



A" 























"W 












-<^*.Vo° f 



% '- A* ,..., %> o * •i^"* 



* ^ 



-* * 













'•••* 4,^ *«• *<» 



'w'/ h W/ r%P^/ 






v S\ 



»' "^ •. 









o v 0ff W™sf« 0> •IBM' V v • wQB& 






*«r 












THE PECULIUM; 



AN ENDEAVOR TO THROW LIGHT ON 
SOME OF THE CAUSES 



DECLINE OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, 



ESPECIALLY IN REGARD TO ITS ORIGINAL CLAIM OF BEING 



THE PECULIAR PEOPLE OF GOD. 



R**r. THOMAS HANCOCK. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

HENRY LONGSTRETH, 

1336 CHESTNUT STREET. 

1860. 



i 



"Mane nobiscum, Domine, 
Et nos illustra Lumine, 
Pulsa mentis caligine, 
Mundum replens dulcedine. 
Quando cor nostrum visitas, 
Tunc lucet ei Veritas, 
Mundi vilescit vanitas, 
Et intus fervet Caritas. M 

S. Bernardi Jubilus Rhythmicus de Nomine Jesus. 



" What Scripture of the New Testament can you read that 
does not prove this to be the Gospel state, a Kingdom of God 
into which none can enter but by being born of the Spirit, 
none can continue to be alive in it but by being led by the 
Spirit ; and in which not a thought, or desire, or action, can 
be allowed to have any part in it, but as it is a fruit of the 
Spirit ?" 

William Law, M.A., Address to the Clergy. 



(2) 




CONTENTS. 



Preface 5 

BOOK I. 
The Idea of Quakerism. 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. 15 

II. Tlie Divine Seed in Christian Sects, and the Ways in 

which it is conditioned by outward Causes . . 22 

III. The Divine Principle of Quakerism, and the two lead- 

ing Quaker Doctrines 29 

IV. The Principle of the Quaker Church . . . .45 
V. The Reflection of the Quaker Idea in Modern Quaker- 
ism 53 



BOOK II. 
The Quaker Schism; or, Formal Quakerism. 
I. The Divine Element, or Contribution, in Quakerism 63 

II. The Foxite Contribution 70 

III The Secular Contribution .82 

book in; 

The Discipline of Quakerism. 

I. 94 

II 101 

III. .109 

IV 118 

(3) 



4 CONTENTS. 

BOOK IV. 

Quaker Conduct, 
chap. PAGE 

I. The Principle of Early Quaker Conduct . . .128 

II. Enthusiasm of Early Quaker Conduct . . .136 

III. Fanaticism of Early Quaker Conduct .... 147 

IV. Intensity of Early Quaker Conduct . . . .160 
V. Reflection of Early Quaker Conduct in Modern Quak- 
erism 167 

BOOK V. 

The World Without : External Causes of Quaker 

Decay. 

I. Sympathy and Antipathy of the Eighteenth Century 175 

II. Quakerism and the Nineteenth Century . . . 184 

III Ibid 194 

IV. Ibid 203 



PREFACE. 



A few sentences only are needful to explain the origin 
of the accompanying Essay. In the month of March, 
1858, there appeared in the public prints the following 
announcement : — 

SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.— PRIZE ESSAY. 
A GENTLEMAN who laments that, notwithstanding the 
population of the United Kingdom has more than doubled 
itself in the last fifty years, the Society of Friends is less in 
number than at the beginning of the century ; and who be- 
lieves that the Society at one time bore a powerful witness to 
the world concerning some of the errors to which it is most 
prone, and some of the truths which are the most necessary 
to it ; and that this witness has been gradually becoming more 
and more feeble, is anxious to obtain light respecting the 
causes of this change. He offers a PRIZE of ONE HUNDRED 
GUINEAS for the best ESSAY that shall be written on the 
subject, and a PRIZE of FIFTY GUINEAS for the one next in 
merit. He has asked three gentlemen, not members of the 
Society of Friends, to pronounce judgment on the Essays 
which shall be sent to them. They have all some acquaint- 
ance with the history of the Society, and some interest in its 
existing members ; and as they are likely to regard the sub- 
ject from different points of view, he trusts that their decision 



6 PREFACE. 

will be impartial ; that they will not expect to find their own 
opinions represented in the Essays ; and that they will choose 
the one which exhibits most thought and Christian earnest- 
ness, whether it is favorable or unfavorable to the Society, 
whether it refers the diminution of its influence to degen- 
eracy, to something wrong in the original constitution of the 
body, to the rules which it has adopted for its government, or 
to any extraneous cause. 

Rev. F. D. MAURICE, Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn; Professor 
J. P. NICHOL, Glasgow ; and Rev. E. S. PRYCE, Gravesend, 
have agreed to act as Adjudicators. 

The number and ability of the Essays which this an- 
nouncement elicited, while it afforded gratifying testimony 
to the interest which the subject has excited, added 
greatly to the labor and responsibility of the adjudi- 
cators. The illness of Professor Nichol, which has since 
terminated in his lamented death, was one of the " unfore- 
seen hindrances" which occasioned the delay of the adjudi- 
cators' decision. It was given in August, 1859, in the 
following terms : — 

SOCIETY OF FRIENDS.— PRIZE ESSAYS. 

The adjudicators of the Prizes for the best Essays on the 
Causes of the Decline in the Society of Friends regret that 
they have been prevented from arriving at an earlier decision 
by unforeseen hindrances, by the large number and extent of 
the Essays submitted to them, and by their exceeding desire 
to deal justly. The terms of the original proposal do not 
permit the adjudicators to specify more than the two Essays 
which appear to them to have the superior claims ; but they 



PREFACE. 7 

feel it right to bear testimony to the great ability displayed 
by many of the other writers, and to record their conviction, 
that the publication of what they have written, by the indi- 
vidual authors, would, in many cases, be advisable, and for 
the public advantage. In performing the painful duty of 
setting aside so many estimable and elaborate productions, 
the adjudicators have necessarily been influenced by various 
classes of considerations : they have been deterred, in some 
cases, by the presence of irrelevant disquisitions, and they 
have been especially solicitous that the spirit manifested by 
the successful candidates be such as seemed most in accord- 
ance with the object for which the prizes were offered, as 
plainly set forth in the general advertisement. It has, after 
careful consideration, been determined that an Essay, bearing 
a motto from a report of the York Quarterly Meeting of the 
year 1855, should receive the first prize ; and one bearing the 
motto Verbum, vita, lux, the second prize. A degree of hesita- 
tion having been expressed by the adjudicators as to the rela- 
tive place which ought to be assigned to the two successful 
essays, the donor of the prizes has generously offered to 
make the second prize equal to the first. The writers of these 
Essays evidently belong to different schools, and contemplate 
the subject from entirely different points of view. No one of 
the adjudicators wishes to be held responsible for the senti- 
ments of either writer. But they are unanimous in hoping 
that, in choosing both, they are doing their best to promote 
the objects of the giver of the prizes, and to fulfill their trust. 

J. P. Nichol. 
F. D. Maurice. 
E. S. Pryce. 

The Essay to which the second prize was adjudged is 
printed in the present volume. 



8 PREFACE. 

Whatever hope I may have had when I commenced, — 
when I had finished the following Essay I certainly had 
no hope at all of seeing my name set forth as one of the 
successful competitors. I felt convinced that my work 
could not answer to the real heart's desire of the generous 
offerer of these prizes. His ultimate hope must have been 
that some expedient might be brought forward by which 
Quakerism could be saved. The whole tenor of my Essay 
goes to prove that its salvation is impossible. The donor 
"laments that the Society of Friends is less in number 
than it was at the beginning of the century." The reader 
will see that my own convictions, as expressed in this 
Essay, compel me rather to rejoice. 

I know that this language must seem strange (perhaps 
pitiable) to those who have been born, who have been 
trained, who have lived their life in Quakerism ; to those 
to whom it has been the universe, who have known nothing 
outside of it ; to those, above all, who have found God 
within it and through it — found Him as their loving 
Father, their hourly Teacher and Saviour. Perhaps, 
too, they will be surprised to find that which they believed 
to be peculiarly their own, their Society's, here spoken of 
as least so. Perhaps they will be still more surprised to 
discover so many and such vital points of affinity between 



PREFACE. 9 

themselves and those whom they have always fancied to 
be (and who, in one sense, are) at the very greatest dis- 
tance from them. I should, indeed, be glad if I could 
but know that this Essay would make any Quaker feel 
that there are fewer obstacles than he supposes (even in 
the principles of his own Society) to the universal union 
of all Christians. But I dare hardly hope so much as 
that this Essay will lead any one Quaker to take, as his 
first step toward the re-binding of Christians, that step 
which our Blessed Lord Himself made the visible bond 
(as his indwelling Spirit is the invisible bond) of Chris- 
tian union — the humble and solemn reception of Holy 
Baptism in the Name of The Father, The Son, and 
The Holy Ghost, at the hands of those whom He, by 
the rulers. and throne-holders of His Spiritual Israel, has 
appointed. Any union that comes from our wills, our 
compromises, our intolerant tolerations, will have no 
binding power, will soon snap. A baptism that is depen- 
dent upon our conversion, our repentance, our faith, our 
excitement, our consciousness, our choice — whether, like 
that of the Anabaptists, it be a baptism of water, or, like 
that of the Quakers, a baptism of imaginary fire — will 
derive its virtue from us, and not from the Holy Ghost — 
will be (as each of these baptisms has been) the cause of 
another separation, instead of the bond of union. 



10 PREFACE. 

The purport of this Essay is historical rather than doc- 
trinal, a consideration which has made me keep out of it 
any dissertation on that Regeneration by Baptism of which 
the profoundest and holiest of the first Quakers have 
written.* Their constant Idea of Baptism is the Idea of 
the Catholic Church, the Idea expressed again and again 
by S. Augustine. I will give two instances, both of them 
from his Homilies on the Gospel of St. John. " It may 
be," he says, "a minister baptizes who belongs not to the 
number of the sons of God, since he lives wickedly, and 
acts wickedly ; what, then, shall console us ? He it is 
Who baptizes."1[ Again, "We confess that both good 
and wicked men are in the Church, but only in the manner 
of grain and chaff. Sometimes he who is baptized by the 
grain is chaff; and he who is baptized by tlje chaff is 
grain. Otherwise, if he who is baptized by the grain 
does well, and he who is baptized by the chaff does ill, 
then it is false, — He it is Who baptizes."% 



* Especially the Baptismologia ; or, Treatise concerning Bap- 
tisms, by Thomas Lawson. 

f " Licet baptizet minister, &c. &c. Hie est qui baptizat."— 
Horn. vii. c. 4, p. 6, torn. xv. [Ed. Caillau.] 

t u Nos fatemur in Ecclesia et bonos et malos, &c. &c. Hie 
est qui BAPTIZA.T."— Horn. vi. c. 12, pp. 472, 473, torn. xiv. 
[Ed. Caillau.] Omnia Opera S. August, 



PREFACE. 11 

No words, no man, could make a fitter passage for me 
to that second class of readers whom I hope my Essay will 
reach : I mean my fellow Churchmen. They will soon see 
with what hope and thankfulness I look upon that great 
revival of the Church and of churchliness which is giving 
so marked a characteristic to our own century. Puri- 
tanism, Quakerism, Methodism, did great good to special 
times, to special classes, to special places. But a revival 
of the Catholic Church must bear blessing for all men, all 
peoples, all places, all future time. This thought it is, 
which makes me dread lest we should, by any fault of ours, 
cripple this Catholic work by mere Sectarian limitations. 
The Adversary's work is always close to the Redeemer's 
work ; wherever we see the Good Seed falling, we may be 
sure that the Sower of Tares is not far off. Brethren, we 
do not belong to ourselves, we are not our own witnesses : 
we belong to the whole world, our witness is in every 
man's conscience. Our cause is not Protestantism, Puri- 
tanism, Quakerism, nor Methodism, — but one Body. 
Brethren, every man, woman, and child in this world was 
created by the Father to be baptized into the Holy 
Catholic and Apostolic Church. Jesus Christ has given 
all mankind to Her ; He has given all mankind a claim 
upon Her. Our charity, as her children, ought to be 



12 PKEFACE. 

greater than the charity of other men; our toleration 
ought to be wider, more tender, more inviting than the 
toleration of Separatists. The Catholic Church called 
the Donatist schismatics " brethren. " She had none the 
less hatred of Schism. The more the charity of God is 
shed abroad in our hearts, the more hateful Schism will 
be to us. She, the living Representative of Jesus in this 
world, ought to be to men all that He was. No as- 
sumption, no pride, no untender or insulting phrases, 
ought to pass her lips in her dealings with the Samaritans 
who surround her. 

No forgetfulness that she is the everlasting Judah, 
the real Kingdom of the Son of David, need be involved 
in her acknowledging as the gift of her King all the 
grace and the piety that she finds in Samaria. Samari- 
tans will not more truly rise up in judgment against 
Jews, than will Separatists against Churchmen. Oh, 
that we could always remember that the Separatist men- 
tioned in the Gospel was casting out devils in the Name 
of Jesus, when the Apostolical College could not cast 
them out ! I should be very thankful if this little book 
would lead a few Churchmen to know one section of 
Schismatics better ; to find in them more to love, more 
to reverence ; to recognize in them the gift of that Son 



PREFACE. 13 

of God who was Incarnate in all Flesh ; Who tasted 
death for every man ; Who lighteth every man that 
cometh into the world ; in Whose Mystical Body, as we 
are saying at this season, Almighty God has knit to- 
gether His elect in One Communion and Fellowship. 

Nottingham, Thursday in the Octave 
of All Saints, 1859. 



THE PECULIUM. 

BOOK I. 

THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 



CHAPTER L 

i. Introductory — Necessary Decay of Human Societies — Pre- 
sumptive Decay of the Quaker Society. 
ii. Decay of Spiritual Societies. 
iii. The Catholic Church, the Universal Society, alone exempt 

from the Law of Social Decay. 
iv. Testimony of all Christian Societies to this Exemption — 

What is the Catholic Church ? 
T. Quakerism originally claimed to be the Catholic Church- 
Modern Quakers have given up the Claim — This Conces- 
sion a Prognostication of Quaker Decay, 
vi. Difficulties of Modern Quakers from this Concession — 

Quakers have lost faith in Quakerism. 
▼ii. Decay of Quakerism to be expected. 

i. It is the lot of societies made up of men and women 
to be subject to a, law of decay. No age or nation has 
ever given birth to a body, guild, association, or church, 
fitted for every time and all races. Indeed, times and 

15 



16 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

nations themselves, being but greater societies, are always 
obeying this very law. The old Ethnic age died a natural 
death ; the Renaissance could not revive it — it only galvan- 
ized an imitation of it. The Mediaeval age could not keep it- 
self alive ; and all the earnest and romantic men in Chris- 
tendom, striving unitedly, would never revive it: Egypt, 
Greece, Rome, the Gothic kingdoms died, as our friends 
have done — as we ourselves shall do — because they must. 
So far as Quakerism is a society made up of men and 
women, we should expect to see it obey the universal law 
of social death. It would appear strange and disorderly 
if it alone continued fresh, lively, and bearing fruit. 

ii. Nor does the comprehension of a diviner purpose and 
of spiritual strength, exempt any society from this imper- 
turbable law. The State and the Church have been served 
and thwarted by society after society, which begun in the 
spirit and ended in the flesh. Old philosophical schools, 
Hindoo and Chinese brotherhoods, early anchorites and 
monks, the Benedictines, the Franciscans and Dominicans, 
the first Protestants, the Puritans, the Methodists, banded 
themselves together to know wisdom, to do the will of 
God, to fulfill all righteousness, to become the most 
utter and unresisting organs and instruments of the 
Spirit, to save the world, to reform the Church, to live 
an entirely spiritual life, to taste the eternal life into which 
death cannot enter; yet these awful intuitions, these 
sublime purposes, could not preserve them ; they are 
all either dying or dead. The morbid and unspiritual 
societies which Quakerism arose to witness against, had 
assumed at their birth that very position toward older 



CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 17 

societies which Quakerism was assuming toward them. 
They believed and proclaimed the same things against 
prior societies which Quakerism was proclaiming against 
them. We should naturally expect that Quakerism would 
follow them, and that it is even now marching with more or 
less haste, overtaken by some, but overtaking others, in that 
valley of the shadow of death where the old spiritual so- 
cieties of the world are either lying dead or dying. It 
would be wonderful indeed, if, like the prophet Ezekiel in 
the valley of dead bones, Quakerism alone were seen living 
and vigorous in that most solemn of all the pathways of 
history and society, the way of perpetual decay and death. 
I know only one premiss upon which such a sight is pos- 
sible. 

iii. For there is a Society above the reach of this law, 
uncontemplated in the promulgation of it, and unaffected by 
any of its penalties. The Elect Body of which the Divine 
Uniter of God and mankind is the Head, has the promise 
of eternal continuance. If it appears (as it has appeared 
a hundred times) to weary, decay, or die, in one time 
or one place, it is only to revive or blossom forth in an- 
other. As the Asiatic and African branches of the 
Church sicken with idolatry or worldliness, or are cut 
down by Mahometanism, the European branches are re- 
formed ; as heresies canker and blight one fair bough or 
another of the great tree of the Church, vigorous shoots 
sprout out in unexpected places, and races who have never 
known anything but weariness, rest themselves and are 
refreshed under the shadow of Christ. This is the Catho- 
2 



18 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I 

lie Church, the Peculium, the Lord's Body, the People 
of God, the Holy Nation, the Spiritual Israel. 

iv. All the Christian Societies which have ever existed, 
agree in acknowledging the everlasting continuance of the 
Catholic Church. They differ when they come to deter- 
mine what the Catholic Church is. Some say it is one 
of these societies — their own society ; all of them have, 
at some part of their history, claimed, or do now claim, to 
be the Church. Others say that it consists visibly of all 
societies except those they like least — most likely of all 
except Romanism and XTnitarianism ; invisibly of all 
those in a state of grace in any of these societies, even in 
Romanism and Unitarianism. Others declare that no 
society existing is the true Seed and People of God ; 
and, consequently, proceed to found the one Holy Catho- 
lic and Apostolic Church upon their own fancies, upon 
private experiences, upon misread history, upon the Bible, 
or upon all together. 

v. The first Quakers announced this claim for their So- 
ciety in its most uncompromising and intolerant form. 
Many of the Quaker leaders would not grant even the 
name of Christian to any one who worshipped apart from 
themselves. Quaker and Christian were mere interchange- 
able terms. Common-prayer-men and Christian, Presby- 
terian and Christian, Independent and Christian, Anabap- 
tist and Christian, Ranter and Christian, were not inter- 
changeable terms.* The distinction is of immense 

* Edward Burroughs' Works, fol., 1672, p. 416.— "All you 
churches and sects, by what name soever you are known in 
the world, you are the seed of the great whore." And the 



CHAP. I.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 19 

importance. No one can understand the decay of Qua- 
kerism, who leaves out this mighty contradiction which 
the sons give to the fathers of Quakerism. The primitive 
Friends said that Quakerism was the Church. Modern 
Friends say it is apart of the Church. Parts must die for 
the whole to live. If Quakerism be a part, it can only 
have a particular, dependent, contingent life ; we can 
have little doubt of its ultimate decay, we can have no 
certainty of its continuing life. "When that which is 
perfect is come," the Apostle says, "that which is in part 
shall be done away. "* In the natural or physical sphere 
of the Kingdom of God we see it is so. The life of the 
body exhibits perpetual death and decay of parts : we cut 
off the boughs that the tree may live. So the Great Hus- 
bandman of the Church is perpetually lopping His own 
tree that it may bring forth more fruit. A time comes 
to every bough when it brings forth nothing, or brings 
forth leaves only. If Quakerism be merely a branch (and 
not alone the retractations of Quakers, but the course of 
the world also, show that it is not the Church), a time 
will surely come when He will lop off Quakerism. It has 

whole of his tract, A Measure, of the Times, 4to., London, 1657, 
pp. 40. See, too, A Testimony from Northampton Prison. By 
William Dewsbury, Joseph Storr, and John Whitehead. " The 
English Church held up by you, the English teachers (that is, 
the Puritan Schism of the Commonwealth), who are made by 
the will of man, those who are come to the Church of God, 
whom you call Quakers, deny such." 4to., London, 1655. 
Also, A Return to the Priests (Ministers) about Beverly, 4to., 
1653.— &c. 

* 1 Corinthians xiii. 10. 



20 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

certainly been pruned very many times. The schisms of 
Perrot, Pennyman, Keith, Bugg, the White Quakers, the 
Hicksites, the Progressive Friends, are all indications of 
the pruning hand of the Lord. 

vi. The full realization of this change of the relation 
of Quakerism to the Catholic Church must bring a great 
deal of conflict and doubt to any Quaker who has begun 
to search the early records of the Society for light on its 
present decay. He would scarcely know whether to re- 
tain George Fox and Edward Burroughs, or Joseph John 
Gurney and William Allen. He would soon see that he 
must give up the one or the other. They have scarcely 
anything in common but their name and their clothes. 
The two former are connected w r ith astonishing success, 
with apostolic earnestness, but also with fanaticism and 
intolerance ; they would lay a burden upon him which it 
would have been easier to carry in the seventeenth cen- 
tury than he would find it in the nineteenth. The two 
latter are connected with peace and serenity, with earnest- 
ness also, though of a weaker kind ; with the most placid 
tolerance, but also with evident decay. He would be in- 
clined, perhaps, to doubt whether this determination of 
the later Quakers, that Quakerism is not the Catholic 
Church, but a part of it, is a desirable one. He might 
ask himself, Is it even one that can be made ? Who made 
the change? Preachers of sermons, writers of advices, 
yearly epistles, men and women with their ''concerns" 
hither and thither? Gould men and women make such a 
change, not in the outward form, but in the very nature 
and essence of the Household of God ? Or, perhaps, an 



CHAP. I.J THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 21 

evangelical education might lead him to conclude that 
Fox and Burroughs were good men, but not well in- 
structed in the doctrines of grace ; and that Gurney and 
Crewdson were improvers of Quakerism. 

These, then, are the two great characteristic features 
of the body in the periods of extension and decay : in the 
period of its growth it proclaimed itself to be the One 
Church, moved and guided by the Inspiring Light, to 
which every one who was led by that Light was sure to 
join himself; in the period of decline it proclaims itself 
to be only a fraction of the One Church. In 1658 there 
was not a Quaker living who did not believe Quakerism 
to be the one only true Church of the living God. In 
1858 there is not a Quaker living who does believe it. 

vii. Whether it be or be not a part of the Catholic 
Church, I neither ask nor answer here. If it be not, it is 
sure to decay; if it be, it is likely to decay. No one 
will deny that the Church of Jerusalem was a true and 
living part of the Catholic Church, and yet the Church 
of Jerusalem has decayed. Decay, under the first suppo- 
sition, would spring from the necessary sentence and seed 
of death in the body itself; decay, under the second sup- 
position, would proceed from degeneracy. 

The purpose of this chapter is to show — first, that there 
is but one condition upon the exhibition of which Quak- 
erism could continue perpetually, on which its decay could 
not be expected ; and, secondly, that Quakerism, by its 
own confession, does not exhibit this condition, and there- 
fore the death of Quakerism must be expected. I shall 
not enlarge upon it here, because I believe all the after- 
part of this Essay will throw back light upon it. 



22 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE DIVINE SEED IN CHRISTIAN SECTS AND THE WAYS 
IN WHICH IT IS CONDITIONED BY OUTWARD CAUSES. 

i. The Divine Seed. 

ii. This Seed the Source of all Divine Fruits in Quakerism, 
iii. The Divine Seed conditioned by the Human Sower — Indivi- 
dualist and Personal Influences instanced in Quakerism, 
iv. The Divine Seed conditioned by the Character and 
Changes of the Soil Without — The Eternal and Tran- 
sient in Quakerism. 
v. The Divine Seed conditioned by a Divine Edict — Given for 
a time and in measure. 

i. Our Lord Jesus Christ compares the growth of 
the Kingdom of Grace to the growth of natural seed. 
He carried out the analogy so fully that I shall be in no- 
wise departing from His method, but keeping most strictly 
in the line of it, if I take it as my guiding rule along the 
series of inquiries upon which we are now entering. The 
mystic theologians assert that the natural and supernatural 
seeds of God have affinities and points of touch more 
subtle and inherent than the unenlightened eye can per- 
ceive. Whatever modern Quakers are, their earliest rep- 
resentatives were certainly mystics; and, after the idea of 



CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 23 

Light, the idea of Seed is that by which they most fre- 
quently express the working of the Divine Principle in 
the heart of a man or of society. 

ii. Of this seed of the Kingdom of Grace our Lord 
Himself has always been understood by Christian people 
to be the Provider and the real Sower. It has been His 
Spirit exciting and aiding prophets, apostles, mission- 
aries, founders of orders, reformers, witnesses for right- 
eousness' sake in every age, which has made them effectual 
sowers. The Seed they sowed was the Word of God*, 
that is, in the most solemn sense, the First Begotten of 
the Father, God Himself. But who could plant God in 
men's hearts ? None, except God Himself. God has been 
the true Sower. Wherever love, truth, wisdom, or right- 
eousness, or any fruit of the Holy Spirit is found, there 
the Seed of the Holy Spirit must first have been. No 
one, with only an hour's acquaintance with the lives and 
books of the Quakers, could honestly doubt that the true 
fruits of the Divine Spirit are found in Quakerism. 
Quakerism, therefore, contains a true Seed and Principle, 
one which existed before and apart from George Fox and 
the seekers of the Commonwealth era, one which he him- 
self declares he was given, and neither discovered nor 
made, but which the Light of Christ discovered to him 
in himself, and enlightened him to perceive in all other 
men. The causes of the decay of Quakerism cannot, of 
course, be found in this. The Divine Seed of its life and 
truth must be of the Divine nature, eternal ; it must not 
only be quite above all the conditions of time, alteration, 



24 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

and decay ; but also, on the other hand, the very cause 
of life, growth, and fruition wherever it is sown. 

iii. But since the Divine Seed of the truth passes 
through the hands of men, and since men are so different, 
it could not be but that it is given a preparatory coloring, 
a mental chemistry of some kind, from the human sower. 
This may be more clearly understood in our time than it 
was in that of the rise of Quakerism. The claimants to 
direct revelations or illumination at that period, which 
was so full of them, were expected to manifest their 
claims in a non-natural and non-rational manner; every- 
thing individual and characteristic about them was ex- 
pected to be suppressed ; they were to be moved by the 
Divine Spirit as machines,* not as human spirits with a 
reason and a will. Multitudes of the first Quaker con- 
verts responded to this demand in the most extraordinary 
fashion. But the tendency of our own time sets in quite 
the opposite direction. Writers who firmly believe in the 
unity of that Spirit from Whom the Scriptures proceed, 
seem to take an almost pedantic delight in showing their 
discernment of the difference of manifestation : they tell 
us that this expression is Hebrew — I should say Hebraic ; 
that this is Greek — Hellenic, I mean ; that certain 
churches and times are characterized by the predominance 
of the Pauline, some of the Petrine, others of the Jo- 
hannine element. However, the fact is true that the 

* Thus Henry More defends himself from the charge of 
being an Enthusiast: "For God doth not ride me as a horse, 
and guide me I know not whither myself ; but converseth with 
me as a Friend. " — Second Lash of Alazonomastix. London, 1656. 



CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 25 

Divine Seed is affected in some degree by the human 
sower, and may grow or decay according to the method 
in which he handles, casts, modifies, interprets it, — inter- 
nally, by the tone and character of his mind and circum- 
stances of his life ; externally, by his energy and enthu- 
siasm : first, as an opinion or doctrine ; secondly, as a 
growing body or society. 

No one, I suppose, would be inclined to deny that 
original Quakerism carries very strong personal character- 
istics upon every corner of its being. Its form, its disci- 
pline, its language, its customs, are not the characteristics of 
any time or of all times, they bear the unmistakable mark 
of one peculiar century. Neither are they the form, dis- 
cipline, opinions, or customs likely to arise from any spir- 
itual man. They bear the characteristic marks of one 
peculiar and representative man. And, indeed, we might 
legitimately divide the history of Quakerism into periods 
or into schools, each time or each section being distin- 
guished by the preponderance of some personal element. 
One period we might call Foxite Quakerism ; another, 
Penn-and-Barclayite Quakerism ; a third, Joseph- John- 
Gurneyite Quakerism. Or, we might name the first kind 
spiritual Quakerism ; the second, doctrinal or scholastic 
Quakerism ; the third, Puritan or modern evangelical 
Quakerism. 

iv. Again. After this seed leaves the hand of the 
sower it has to accommodate itself to very different soils. 
After it has grown up into a plant of more or less strength, 
service, and grandeur, it has to endure and resist the 
lightnings, the rainy winds and tempests, the arid, dry 



26 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

seasons, and all the healthy and unhealthy alternations of 
the spiritual universe. There might be that both true 
and erroneous in the hearts and minds of Englishmen in 
the middle of the seventeenth century, which demanded 
something like Quakerism, and to which Quakerism would 
appear to be the answer, — both the eternal necessary 
truth in Quakerism, and the outward partial reflex of that 
truth, and all the lesser contingencies bound up with that 
reflex, the characteristics and individualities of its pro- 
mulgators, and the loose, drifting opinions of the time. 
That craving may not exist in our time ; or, rather, it 
exists in spirit alone, and needs its answer and satisfac- 
tion in a very different reflex or form, with other kind 
of contingencies, with personal characteristics of men 
living and working among us ourselves, mingled with 
opinions and peculiarities of our time. For that which 
is eternal in Quakerism, its idea or principle, must be ne- 
cessary to every time, because it is an effluence from that 
Life, a ray from that Light, Who is above and beneath, 
before and after all times, the Lord of all the seasons and 
changes of the universe ; He with whom a day is as a 
thousand years ; the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 
The nineteenth century needs Him as much as the seven- 
teenth, and needs as much each of the several principles 
or graces of His Being. Statesmen, priests, leaders of 
thought, artists, men of science in Victoria's reign, want 
faith in and use of the Quaker principle, just as much as 
the poor peasants in the Yale of Beavor and old Notting- 
ham, under Cromwell and Charles the Second. The re- 
flex or form of that principle may have been peculiarly 



CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 27 

adapted to that kind of men and kind of time, and yet 
as plainly unfit for us and for our time. And so, 
indeed, actual history (that real recording book of the 
judgment of God) proves it. Great ecclesiastical move- 
ments, changes in the course and temper of thinking dis- 
coveries, " every vvind of doctrine/'* are as much the min- 
isters of God, and do His will in the spiritual world, upon 
His spiritual seed, and upon the growths from that seed, 
as do the natural wind, rain, and lightning upon His 
natural seed in His physical kingdom ; and it is these 
ministers of His which are destroying Quakerism. 

v. Lastly. The Seed sown may carry the sentence of 
death in itself: it may be meant for a time only. But 
I spoke of the seed of which George Fox was the sower, 
as containing a Divine and, therefore, an eternal element : 
if it did so, how can its life cease ? I will answer by 
transferring the Quaker proposition concerning the prin- 
ciple of Divine life in a man to the principle of Divine 
life in a religious society. " God," said Robert Barclay, 
" has communicated and given unto every man 7 ' (substi- 
tute "unto every religious society") "a measure of the 
Light of His own Son, a measure of grace, or a measure 
of the Spirit, which the Scripture expresses by several 
names, as sometimes of the Seed of the Kingdom, "f 
Every religious movement and society, in so far as it is 
human and has had a man for its outward originator 
(other than the Divine Man), as such must die. God's 

* Eph. iv. 14. 

f Apology, Proposition xi. ch. v. p. 107. Baskerville, 4to., 
1765. 



28 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

Spirit may have been granted to him and to his society 
in very great measure ; all the good and vigorous fruition 
it has ever put forth must be the result of that grant ; but 
it was granted by measure. A time will come, that time 
has come to all societies that have any history, when its 
life will be languid, and the good fruits grow fewer. Only 
one Man partook of the Spirit without measure, the Son 
of God Himself; and only that Universal Society which 
He began with the audible call of His own voice, and the 
imposition of His very hands, and the inspiration of His 
very breath, has, as we assumed in the commencement of 
this Essay, the seed for an everlasting continuance. 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 29 



CHAPTER III. 

THE DIVINE PRINCIPLE OF QUAKERISM, AND THE TWO 
LEADING QUAKER DOCTRINES. 

i. The Light Within. 

ii. The Light Within proclaimed by Greorge Fox as the Cen- 
tral Truth of the Gospel — His Experience — Experiences of 
the Co-founders. 
iii. The Process of the Light Within upon the Soul — The Light 
the Principle of Conviction, of Salvation, of a New 
Birth, of the Church, of Ministry, of Doctrine, of Power, 
iv. The Light Within a Divine Person — The Living Word, 
v. This Person the Principle of Quakerism—Language of Fox, 

Penn, Naylor. 
vi. The Light in all Men — Universal Sympathies of the first 
Quakers, 
vii. The two leading Quaker Doctrines : (a) The Immediate 

Light Within ; (b) The Universality of the Light Within. 
viii. Effect of Faith in these Doctrines on the first Quakers. 
ix. Results of Faith in the Immediate Light Within. 
x. Results of Faith in the Universality of the Light. 
xi. Witness borne by these Doctrines for the Race — Against 

the World. 
xii. Witness borne by them Against the Sects. 
xiii. Witness borne by them Against the Church. 

i. The distinctive idea or principle of Quakerism — 



30 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

the heart from which its first wonderful vitality pro- 
ceeded — is to be found in its actual belief of the truth of 
Saint John's declaration : that the True Light — the Word 
and Son of God — enlightens every man who comes into 
the world.* From the very first, the doctrine of the Light 
Within has been felt to be the centre of the Quaker 
system. Against that doctrine all the acute controver- 
sialists who have attacked Quakerism through the whole 
course of its history have mustered and opposed their ar- 
guments. They saw that if they could disprove the truth 
of that, they would strike Quakerism at the very root. 

ii. The founder of Quakerism and his companions as- 
serted this indwelling presence of the Divine Word in all 
their appeals, and pointed to it as the reason of them. 
They put forward their belief in it as the first and central 
truth of the Gospel, as a full and sufficient justification 
for their forsaking all existing Christian societies. All 
the men and women in England at that time were excited 
about religion : it was not only the life and business of 
the pious — it was the daily chatter, the ordinary amuse- 
ment of the worldly. Their king and bishops, in endeav- 
oring to carry out a religion they fancied, had lost life and 
office ; the Commons, to carry out a religion they fancied, 
had overturned an old Church and State, and were trying 
to make new ones. 

To a man who desired above everything else to be, as 
George Pox says his own father was called, "righteous 
Christer,"f and the sole business of whose life was the 

* St. John i. 9. 

f From his baptismal name Christopher. — Journal, p. 1, fol. 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 31 

single-hearted endeavor to discover God, all this excite- 
ment about reformation of Church and State, and purifi- 
cation of doctrine, must have seemed a mere outside mat- 
ter. The very Saviour, the object of their purified doc- 
trine, the Head of their reforming Church, was apprehended 
by them outwardly alone.* " The faith of the sects," said 
he, " stands in a Man who died at Jerusalem sixteen hun- 
dred years ago."f What could this help him ? He wanted 
a deliverer for that year, for that hour, a light for every 
moment. He found in himself, he says, two contradictory 
thirsts, "one after the creatures, to get help and strength 
there ; and the other after the Lord the Creator and His 
Son Jesus Christ." J It was within his own heart that 
these two tendencies contradicted one another, and strove 
to cast out one another. Let the Church of England be 
governed by bishops, or by presbyters, or be left ungov- 
erned ; let public prayers be extempore or from a book ; 
let water baptism be by dipping, or sprinkling ; let the 
Bible be a Calvinistic, or Arminian book, or something 
between the two — this war would still be going on in the 

* See the healthy queries of Cromwell: " Do we own one 
another more for the Grace of God, and for the Spiritual Re- 
generation, and for the image of Christ in each other, or for 
our agreement with each other in this or that form of opinion? 
Do we search first for the Kingdom of Christ within us before we 
search one without us ? Do we not more contend for Saints 
having rule in the World than over their own hearts?" A 
Declaration of His Highness the Lord Protector, inviting the people 
of England and Wales to a day of Solemn Fast, — Mercurius Poli- 
tico, March 16 to 23, 1654. 

+ Journal, fol. ed. 1694. % Ibid. pp. 8-9. 



32 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

hidden battle-field of his own heart ; and no decision of 
such mere external questions could give victory to one 
side or the other there. 

He separated himself "from all priests and professors, 
carnal talk and talkers," and attended only to " Christ, who 
had the key, and who," says he "opened the door of Life 
and Light unto me." As the Light appeared all appeared 
that is 6ut of the Light — darkness, death, temptations, 
the unrighteous, the ungodly — all was manifest and seen 
in the Light." In Christ's Light he saw the evil of his 
own mere creaturely thirst, and of all the deeds and 
thoughts which flowed from it : in Christ's Light he found 
the satisfaction of that higher thirst after real fellowship 
with God : in Christ's Light he found power to subdue 
and keep under all the selfish and wilful tendencies of his 
being. The Grace of God must be sought for and felt in 
a man's own heart if he would be delivered from his sin 
and his fear by that Grace. All the Sects he saw look- 
ing to old writers, to learned languages, to doctrines, to 
an improved Church system, to the Bible, to favorite 
preachers, for the Light. But it was not in any of them. 
The true Light was within man himself. They need not 
believe it on his testimony. The Light Himself would 
witness that He was there, if they would cease from their 
own works, wait, and let Him shine forth and manifest 
their darkness, and work in them. 

The first preachers of Quakerism, also, who travelled 
and labored with George Fox at its commencement — 
Howgill, Naylor, Burroughs, Dewsbury, Audland, and 
others — who were, like him, illiterate men have most of 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 33 

them left personal descriptions of their conversion. They 
might one and all be described in nearly the same words;* 
for they one and all found rest for their hearts and minds in 
the firm faith that a Saviour within them was their need, 
and that they had one. With this one central doctrine of 
the Light Within they went up and down England, doing 
battle with all the Sects which had arisen over the pros- 
trate Church. 

iii. They spake of this Light Within as the only true 
Principle of Conviction; in Solomon's words, as "the 
candle of the Lord searching all the inward parts,"t 
shining into the most secret corners of the heart, and re- 
vealing every sin, however petty, wherever hidden. 

They spake of this Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Salvation. By single-hearted trust in this, every 
soul might be delivered from its old bondage to the Devil, 
to itself, and to the world. 

They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Regeneration, as that very Seed of the New 

* See — (I.) W. Sewell, History of the Rise, Increase, and Pro- 
gress of the Christian People called Quakers : Conversion of How- 
gill p. 54; of Burroughs, p. 55, &c, &c, London, fol., 1722. 
(II.) John Whitehead, Enmitie between the Two Seeds: written 
in gaol, London, 4to., 1655. (III.) John Perrot, Preface to his 
Mystery of Baptism : written in Rome, Prison of Madmen, Lon- 
don, 4to., 1664. (JSf.) William Dewsbury, A Discovery of the 
Great Enmity of the Serpent against the Seed of the Woman, contains 
his autobiography, under the title " The First Birth," London, 
4to., 1655, &o. 

f Proverbs xx. 27. 

3 



34 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

Birth whose growth enabled a man gradually to cast off 
the sins, errors, and diseases of the old nature, and to put 
on the truth and holy healthfulness of that New and yet 
Original, because Eternal Nature, recovered for all men 
by the Lord Jesus Christ. 

They spoke of the Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Association, or ground of a Church. By sub- 
mitting to this they would find Christ's Divine Light and 
Life in themselves yearning after, and seeking to join itself 
to that which is of him in every other ; and forming and 
extending, out of the very necessity of its nature, the So- 
ciety or Kingdom of God. 

They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Vocation, or direction. By taking heed to this 
every Christian may see at once what he is to avoid, or 
what to do ; and may hear whenever he faithfully listens 
(as they were continually quoting), a voice saying, " This 
is the way, walk ye in it."* 

They spoke of this Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Illumination. By this their minds were enlight- 
ened to perceive truth from error, right from wrong ; to 
discern men's spirits and conditions; to see the deceits 
in opposers, and the wants in those who needed teaching. 

They spoke of the Light Within as the only true Prin- 
ciple of Inspiration. By this they had breathed into 
them Truth to declare, and the courage, energy, and wis- 
dom to declare it faithfully. 

iv. This unusual manner of speaking of the Light 
Within as the one efficient cause of the whole regenerate 

* Isaiah, xxx. 21. 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 35 

life of the soul, may, perchance, lead some reader to mis- 
apprehend the intention of the primitive Quakers when 
they did so. Our notion of Light as a mere enlighten er, 
as the opposite of darkness, is sure to mislead us if we 
transfer it to the Spiritual Light here spoken of, if we use 
it as our means of understanding that Light. When the 
first Quakers spoke of the Light as sufficient to salvation, 
they did not baldly mean that it had the property of en- 
lightening or manifesting, that it gave a true understand- 
ing of the position of matters ; they always apprehended 
it as it was spoken of by Saint John, as a Living Light. 
11 In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of men."* 
"This Light," says George Keith and Benjamin Furly, 
"hath Life in it, and an universal virtue and power to 
reach unto the whole man, not only to cure the blindness 
of his understanding, but the perverseness of his will and 
the depravedness of his affections. " Again : "We do not 
understand the Light, or Grace, or Gift of God and Jesus 
Christ, as separate from God and Christ, for that is as 
impossible as to separate beams from the sun, for God and 
Christ are one with the Light that comes from Them for 
ever."f 

* St. John i. 4. 

f Universal Free Grace of the Gospel Asserted; or, the Light of the 
Glorious Gospel. 4to. pp. 136. London, 1671. See tlie Pre- 
face, p. vi. "Not, as is asserted, the Arminian, or Papist no- 
tion of universal grace. They both deny that the Universal 
Light which is given to all is the Light Evangelical, or light for 
the faith of the Gospel to rest in. Therefore, they do not 
hold it forth as the immediate object of the Christian faith. — 
Secondly they deny the way and manner of its operation to be 



36 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

v. The "Principle," therefore, of the primitive Quaker 
Theology was a Person. That Principle was God Him- 
self ; or, was that Holy Spirit by Whom the Divine 
Unity makes known His presence in us, and through 
Whom the Father and the Son come to us and take up 
Their abode with us. William Penn adopted the expres- 
sion of Plotinus, "the Divine Principle in man," as an 
ancient testimony to Quaker doctrine. Some modern 
controversialists have made merry with this expression, 
and ask if a Principle can make " groaning which cannot 
be uttered F" if a Principle can " intercede for us ?" if we 
can be "baptized into the name of a Principle?" Yes, 
we can. Where the Principle is a gracious, enlightening 
Being, a Divine Person, as He is to Whose presence 
William Penn and George Pox witnessed, we surely can. 

I will append some instances of this use from Quaker 
writings. " While I lay thus in prison," (at Worcester), 
says George Pox, " it came upon me to state our 
Principle to the King, not with particular relation to my 
own sufferings, but for his better information concerning 
our Principle and us as a people. It was thus, and thus 
directed : ' To the King. The Principle of the Quak- 
ers is the Spirit of Christ, Who died for us, and is 
risen for our justification ; by which we know that we are 
His, and He dwelleth in us by His Spirit, and by the 
Spirit of Christ we are led out of unrighteousness. ■ "* 

by Immediate Revelation. Thirdly, they say this Light comes from 
Christ ; but Christ himself is not in man in the true seed of Regen- 
eration." 

* Journal, 1674, p. 422. 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 37 

" The Light of Christ," says James Naylor, "is the first 
Principle that shows a man his condition, and leads to 
Christ the Saviour, and without it the Gospel is hid 
from every creature living." * f 

vi. But when the truth was firmly believed by George 
Fox, by his converts, or by any others whom the Divine 
Spirit was leading along the same paths, that Christ is 
giving a direct and personal Light, that men can hear 
Him speaking to their hearts and consciences, there is a 
danger lest they should fancy themselves favorites of His; 
should introduce this qualification of His Grace, that He 
speaks only in the hearts and consciences of a few chosen 
ones ; and should proceed to divide the Humankind into 
those to whom the Divine Word is speaking, and those 
to whom He is altogether silent. But George Fox was 
listening to Him with a pure and single heart. Every 
page of his early history, the revelations of his strenuous 
inward fight, the oppositions of the Sects, the successes 
of his ministry, all show us that he was being led to the 
conviction that he most truly followed the Divine Light 
when he attested it to be the common fountain of Grace 
in every man, the witness of God in every man, — when 
he felt that it was not God's mark of favoritism and se- 

* Second Answer to Thomas Moore, Proposition I. 4to. 1665. 

f " Their testimony was to the Principle of God in Man, the 
precious pearl and leaven of the Kingdom, as the only blessed 
means appointed of Grod to quicken, convince and sanctify 
Man. So they opened to them what It was in Itself, and what 
It was given to them for." — William Perm's Preface to George 
Fox's Journal. 1694. 



38 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

paration upon him, but His universal gift to mankind. 
" The Lord opened to me by His invisible power," says 
he, " how every man was enlightened by the Divine Light 
of Christ." " Wicked men," he says, " were enlightened 
by this Light — how else could they hate it ?" The Light 
is neither conditioned by time, place, religion, occupation, 
moral character, age, nor sex; it has no opposition except 
sin and self-willed darkness. The Old Testament shows 
that the history of mankind before Christ came in the 
Flesh is a history of the strife of the Light with men ; 
with those who obeyed the Light, like Moses and David ; 
and those who resisted the Light, like Pharaoh. George 
Fox wrote two Epistles to the Jews of his own day, 
appealing to the Light of the Messiah within them. He 
wrote also to the Pope, to the Emperor, the Kings of 
France and Spain, to Oliver Cromwell, to Charles the 
Second, to all Bishops and Priests in Christendom ; to 
merchants, to judges, to masters of ships and seamen, to 
all the several Sects ; in every letter he speaks to the Di- 
vine Witness in them ; he feels that there is a Pure Light, 
a Holy Will, within one and all, shining upon and striving 
with their hearts and consciences, and waiting to save 
them, if they will obey and follow Him. 

vii. Whatever other doctrines the Quakers may have ac- 
cepted, whether from George Fox, from the loose, airy, 
notional teachers of their time, or from their own experi- 
ences, or whatever doctrines they may have deduced from 
these primary ones — this belief, first, in the Light of Christ 
within, and secondly, in the Universality of His Light, 
separated and distinguished them by impassable marks 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 39 

from all other Sects. It would be better, perhaps, to see 
this in their own words than in mine. "There be two 
main or principal things held forth by us, which are as it 
were the hvo hinges or fundamental principles upon 
which all other things relating to doctrine or practice af- 
firmed by us do hang and depend. The first is, that 
there is no saving knowledge of God or the things of His 
Kingdom attainable but by the Immediate Revelation of 
Jesus Christ, Who is the Image, Word, and Light, of 
the Invisible God, in which alone He can be manifest unto 
the salvation of men. The second is that this Image, 
Word, or Light, which is Jesus Christ the Son of the 
Father's love, doth shine forth in some measure univer- 
sally, and enlightens every man that comes into the world, 
and thereby giveth him a day of visitation whereby it is 
possible for him to be saved."* 

viii. These were the two principal messages which the 
primitive Quakers felt themselves called out to announce 
to all mankind. , They went forth with a full confidence 
that they needed no other weapons for the conquest of 
their own souls or of the world to the Kingdom of Christ. 
Every hour bore a witness in their own souls to the truth 
of these doctrines. Each blind, cold, idle, or wicked 
thought or volition in which they had ever indulged, they 
could trace to a disbelief that the Light was striving with 
them, or to a disbelief that He was striving with others 
also. All the Bible, too, seemed to second their deduc- 
tions ; and the lives of the saints showed that the be- 

* Benjamin Furly and George Keith. Universal Free Grace 
of the Gospel, frc. Ut supra. 



40 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I 

lief in an ever-present, assisting, restraining Spirit was 
at the root of all their holy acts. Christ was speaking 
to them at the very spring and centre of their being. The 
way in which St. Paul describes the beginning of his new 
life is, "It pleased God to reveal His Son in me." But 
a revelation is not a putting-in, an introduction of some- 
thing new. It is a taking away of all veils and hiding media 
from that which is already there. Christ was in Saul, 
Saul was kicking against the xhtpa of the Light, before 
the Father revealed him there.* 

ix. Their faith in the first truth, the Light Within, when 
they compared it with the dogmas and exercises through 
which they had endeavored to get nearer to God, filled 
them with an awful and joyous sense of the Divine Pres- 
ence. They had neither to rush to steeple-houses, to the 
popular preachers, to the Bible, nor to exercises, for their 
God. All the time they were striving and straining to 
reach Him, He was near to them : He, the Divine Word, 
was discerning all the thoughts and intents of their hearts ; 
all their being lay open and manifest in His sight. So soon 
as they believed in His Light, He not only showed them 
present duty, and filled them with present grace, but He 
threw rays backward on all the rugged and bloody passes 
of discipline by which He had been leading them : they 
saw He had been with them even in these hours in which 
they had felt most alone. Before George Fox " came to 
the Light," his biography contains passages which might 

*Acts ix. 5. K'tvrp* literally goads, or anything with, a sharp 
end. The tragic poets used the expression for resistance 
against the Divine will. JEschylus, Prometheus, 323. 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 41 

be put into the " experiences" of a hyper-Calvinist, and 
would not seem out of place. There are all those alterna- 
tions of bright and dark — of Christ's absence and Christ's 
presence — that April-day theory of Christian Life, which 
seems to make the Presence of God dependent upon our 
consciousness of it; and in which, indeed, is shadowed 
forth the true and awful thought that the blessing of His 
Presence does depend upon our consciousness of it. But 
after George Fox is " enlightened, " these doubts seem 
never to find one moment's place in his heart. He believes 
that Christ is always with him. When the Quakers felt 
it true that Christ their Teacher was with them, and not 
only teaching them, but also helping them to carry out 
their lesson, it must have flashed upon them with a new 
strength that he had done everything, had found every- 
thing ; and they felt they could cry, "Not unto us, 
Lord," with a fervor that no others could. 

x. Their faith in the second truth — the universality of 
the Light Within — filled them with hope for the world. 
Those sects and churches might despair which believed 
God had rejected, by a fixed decree, great hosts of men 
and women. But they who believed that His own Son 
was then and ever knocking at the door of every heart 
and conscience in the universe, could not give up the 
worst sinner, the darkest heathen. There was hope for 
such as long as there was light, mercy, and power in 
Christ. It was the intensity of this faith to which they 
chiefly owed their wonderful success. 

xi. Such effects had the belief of these two doctrines 



42 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

upon the first Quakers themselves. What witness did 
they bear to the world, the Sects, and the Church ? 

They bore to the world the clearest witness of God's 
redeeming grace and forgiveness, which was heard in En- 
gland during the whole of the seventeenth century : they 
declared that no man, woman, or child under heaven was 
left without Christ's sufficient Light and Grace. They 
bore a witness against all the efforts of worn and restless 
spirits to find rest in outward alterations of the State and 
Church, in reformations, godly disciplines, parliaments: 
the Saviour of men comes to them where their disease is — 
within. They bore also a more self-evident witness of 
condemnation against the world than any of the Sects 
were doing, since they attested the Light and Grace of 
the Saviour in every one, and that no one was left un- 
spoken to by Him. He would be able to say to each in 
the judgment, " I shone a Light in your streets, yea, a 
domestic Light in your very houses, and ye shut your eyes 
to Me, ye would none of my reproof." 

xii. They bore a witness against all those doctrines of 
the Sects, which hemmed in and conditioned the Grace 
of God, or which substituted the understandings and 
wills of men for It. Whilst these doctrines seemed to be 
the most self-turned and introspective of any ever held by 
Christian men, they bore a true witness against that un- 
healthy kind of self-turning and introspection from which 
we saw George Fox escaped the moment he believed in 
the abiding indwelling Light of Christ. They witnessed 
to the unchangeable and faithful nature of God, that the 
Lord was not fickle and repenting. They bore also a clear 
witness against the loose antinomian dogma of outward 



CHAP. III.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 43 

imputation (into which the popular theology was in con- 
stant danger of falling), by calling men away from it into 
a real righteousness, and to the desire of a new life, which 
Christ Himself, the Source of Life, would beget within 
their very wills (if they would submit to Him), by giving 
them of His own righteous Spirit and Nature. They 
re-proclaimed, so to speak, the very graciousness of the 
Father's Grace, as much to the Sects as to the World ; 
for the Puritans so hid the Gospel with qualifications, 
that their preaching of it appeared sometimes a torment, 
and sometimes a riddle ;"* and the Incarnation and Sacri- 
fice of our Blessed Lord a problem, or an act of wrath. 
They bore also a witness against the Pelagian and Soci- 
nian dogmas, which, by setting up a light of nature and 
free-will, seemed to make every man his own saviour ; for 
they answered to the witness of all renewed consciences, 
that every good act and thought in them proceeded from 
the inspiration of the Spirit of Christ, f 

* Isaac Penington : Letters. — " Peter Chalfont, 19th, 6 m. 
1665. I received from thee a paper of Richard Baxter's, sent, 
I believe, in love. And in love am I pressed to return unto 
thee my sense thereof. It seems to me very useful and 
weighty, so far as it goes. But, indeed, there is a great defect 
in it, in not directing sinners to that Principle of Life and 
Power, wherein and whereby they may do that which he ex- 
horteth them to do. For how can they come to a true sensi- 
bility or repentance, or join in covenant with God through 
Christ, until they know and receive somewhat from God 
whereby it may be done ?" 

f Robert Barclay : Apology, Prop. iv. — " Man, as he is in this 
state, can know nothing aright ; yea, his thoughts and con- 



44 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

xiii. Lastly, the Quaker assertion of these two doctrines 
bore a witness against the forgetful n ess and formalism of 
the Church. These doctrines are often expressed, always 
implied, in all the offices of her Liturgy. Indeed, the 
very name Catholic and Apostolic ; the pretence of being 
National ; the Sacrament of Baptism given to the chil- 
dren of all parents, bad or good ; the Confirmation Of- 
fice, and much more, would be like mockeries, if the two 
leading doctrines of the early Quakers were untrue. 

ceptions concerning God and things spiritual, until he be dis- 
joined from this evil seed, and united to the Divine Light, 
are unprofitable both to himself and others. Hence are re- 
jected the Socinian and Pelagian errors, in exalting a natural 
light." Baskerville, 4to., p. 73. See, too, Isaac Penington : 
The F'esh and Blood of Christ both in the Mystery and the Outward, 
pp. 41, 42. London, 12mo., 1675. 



CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 45 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF THE QUAKER CHURCH. 

i. How far Puritanism believed in the Light of Chkist With- 
in — Made it dependent upon Consciousness — Restricted 
it to the Elect. 

ii. Unrestricted by Quakerism — Objection of Puritans that it 
destroys Election and the Church, by the plea of Uni- 
versality. 

iii. Quakers affirm that it affords the only means for knowing 
the Church — Confirms Election. 

iv. Quaker Idea of the Church — The Society obeying the Di- 
vine Light within them. 

v. The Church a Baptized Body — A Communicating Body. 

vi. The Church a Spiritual Society — An Inspired Society — A 
Universal Society — A Society manifesting God's Aspect 
to the World, 
vii. Essential Catholicity of this Idea and these Truths — Their 
ready adoption by the Christian Conscience — Quakers 
re-proclaim them, 
viii. Witness borne by the Quaker re-proclamation against 
the Churchmen, Separatists, and Politicians of the 
Time — The Catholic Church not a merely National 
Body. 

ix. Not a Political Body — Not a Hierarchical Body. 

i. Most of the religious sects coexisting with Quaker- 



46 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

istn at its first appearance, would have readily acknow- 
ledged its doctrine of the Inward Light of Christ, had 
it been introduced to them under certain modifications. 
They would have liked it translated into the kind of theo- 
logical language to which their ears were accustomed. 
They would have wished it restricted to those under the 
influence (as they would have said) of a saving faith. 
Owen, Howe, Goodwin, Bunyan, and the whole school of 
the Puritans, believed that Christ was within them, re- 
sisting their most inward sins. Indeed, the almost invar- 
iable subject of the thousands of sermons which they have 
left us, is the working of Christ within the soul of the 
believer ; of the dark moments when He is hidden, the 
light moments when He is seen ; and they are full of ex- 
hortations to believe that He, the faithful Lord, is really 
there, even though this or that black dispensation seems 
to hide Him. That "the preachers of the world take a 
text of the saints' conditions, and study what they can 
raise out of it," is a perpetually recurring topic of anger 
in the early Quaker tracts. Two parallel tables might be 
made out, in which the same facts, put into Quaker lan- 
guage in one table, into Puritan language in the other, 
would bear witness that the same Lord was the real 
Teacher of both, and that both were struggling with a 
common evil nature. The Quaker Theology, however, 
(considering the two in their bearings upon men con- 
sciously Christian), had one great feature distinguishing 
it from the Puritan. We should never be led to suspect 
from any Quaker's diary that he fancied the presence of 



CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OP QUAKERISM. 47 

the Divine Word in his soul depended upon his thinking 
He was there. 

ii. We find this distinction confirmed when we come 
to the Quaker doctrine concerning men not consciously 
Christian. For they tell every man that he has Christ 
the Light with him, and that the Seed of Eternal Life is 
really lying at the very root of his being, under the Seed 
of Death. They cried out that the Just and Holy God 
had no favorites ; that He was not giving His Son to 
one, keeping Him from another : Christ was not only in 
the holy and Christlike, He was enlightening those who 
hated Him and were unlike Him. The popular contro- 
versialists asserted it against them. They said that such 
a doctrine made nothing of the Divine Sovereignty. 
They said that the whole Bible, from the acceptance of 
Abel to the casting out of Judas, was a history of Elec- 
tion. Is there no called fellowship, no Elect, no Pecu- 
lium, no Body of Christ ? Does not this doctrine of the 
Light of Christ Within make the division of men into a 
World and Church impossible ? 

iii. The Quakers had an answer ready. No, they would 
say ; the doctrine of the Light Within gives us the surest 
method for separating the Church from the World. It is 
a great matter to have Christ's Light within us, to be 
possessors of His striving grace. But it is not the whole 
matter. He is in us to renew us ; He is in us as the Seed 
of a New Birth to grow up into the Tree of a New Life. 
He is in us to remould and restore our hearts and lives to 
that original likeness to Him from which they have fallen. 
Some hearts obey His efforts ; in the Apostle's words they 



48 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

become " fellow-workers" with that God Who is working 
in them to will and to do.* He is in these to salvation ; 
He treads under one by one all their sins. But others 
shut the eye of their souls to the Divine Light; they resist 
His loving strife. The Light is in these to condemnation : 
they "love darkness rather than Light, because their deeds 
are evil."f 

The primitive Quakers would also say : ' Nor does our 
Principle destroy the doctrine of Election ; it confirms 
it; it settles it upon an immovable basis.' George Fox 
was constantly preaching that that which God elected was 
really good, that which he reprobated really wicked ; and 
that His righteous Reason and Will, and not a cold, rea- 
sonless decree, was at the root of election and reproba- 
tion. J 

iv. The Quakers, then, would realize the Church as 
that body of men and women who consciously obeyed the 
Light. They would realize the World as that whole 
body of men and women who were consciously resisting 
the Light, who were choosing Darkness. Christ was in 
the obedient with a depth and fulness which the disobe- 
dient could never approach unto, nor dream of; which 
neither secular learning, nor Bible knowledge could give 

* Philip, ii. 13. f St. John iii. 19. 

% " I opened to him (Justice Robinson) the parables, and 
how Election and Reprobation stood ; as that Reprobation 
Stood in the first birth, and Election stood in the second birth," 
— Journal, p. 62, 1651. Also his reasoning with the Particular 
Baptists, pp, 173, 330—31, 1665 ; and in many other places, ed. 
1694. 



CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 49 

them. He had so come to them, they had so received 
Him, that He had taken up His abode in them, and dwelt 
in them, and they dwelt in Him ; His Spirit moved their 
spirits, and all their acts were His. Hence they always 
spoke of the Church (that is, of Quakerism) as a divinely 
inspired body, and as an infallible body. 

v. The Apostles had spoken of the Church as a body 
bound together by the seal of Baptism. The Quakers 
said that the witness of the Apostles was true, for Christ 
had admitted them into His Church by baptizing them 
with His Spirit and with fire. The Apostles had spoken 
of the Church as a society of men and women communi- 
cating in the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus. The 
Quakers said that they eat and drank of the Spiritual 
Life of Jesus, in their spirits. Our Lord had declared 
it to be the first duty of His Church to make disciples of 
all nations. The primitive Quakers went up and down 
England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, the 
American Colonies, calling on men to obey Christ's 
Light within them, and to enter into the Body bound 
together by the Baptism of His Spirit. 

vi. These, then, were the leading doctrines involved in 
the primitive Quaker Idea of the Church : first, the 
Church is a Spiritual Body, the Kingdom of God is a 
Kingdom of Spirits : secondly, the Church is a Ca'holic 
Body; it is a kingdom over spirit as such, implicitly a 
kingdom over all spirits ; a society built up not out of 
national existence, nor out of theBibl e, nor out of doc- 
trine, but out of the very nature of men themselves as 
spirits : thirdly, the Church is an Inspired Body, a king- 
4 



50 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

dora whose laws and privileges touch the heart and will — 
a society of men and women moved to live a holy life, 
and to do mighty works, by the indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost : and lastly, the Church is the living manifestation 
of Him to the world. 

vii. Before I speak of the witness borne by these doc- 
trines against the Church and the Sects during the Pro- 
tectorate and the Restoration, I will make a few remarks 
which may throw light on their ready acceptance by the 
Christian conscience. In the first place, they are the 
very same doctrines which, expressed in diverse forms, 
perhaps, have been held by almost all Christian men in 
all ages, and held with especial clearness and force by 
those otherwise un-Quakerly men, the Catholic Fathers. 
Again, it was the forgetfulness of these doctrines by the 
Church and the Sects, or the substitution of glosses and 
explanations for them, or the displacing of them from 
their central position, which gave cause for the re-procla- 
mation of them by Quakerism, and afforded spiritual men 
and women show of excuse for entering the Quaker body. 
Furthermore, it was in the proclamation of these primary 
truths, and not in the peculiar, limitary, and Puritan de- 
ductions which the Quakers modelled out of these truths, 
or the narrow Society which they built upon them, that 
the real strength of Quakerism consisted. It was these 
which bore the witness to the universal consciences of men 
that Fox and Naylor, Burroughs and Howgill, were 
preaching to them a Principle which they felt they needed 
and ought to possess, and which had often occurred to 
their own hearts during the wreck and tempests of the 



CHAP. IV.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 51 

Church and State. It was by not acknowledging these 
truths as true, and by not asserting or proving that the 
Church, or Presbyterianism, or Independency, or the 
Fifth Monarchy, was the true and legitimate deduction 
from, or answer to, these truths, that Churchmen, Presby- 
terians, Independents, and the rest, fell before the attacks 
of the Quakers in every part of England. 

viii. These truths bore a witness against the notions of 
the Churchmen, the Puritans, and the Politicians of the 
time, that the Church was a mere national body, to be 
oppressed or helped by Kings or Parliaments, to be dis- 
figured or reformed by abolition or restoration of the 
Catholic orders or the Presbyterian ministry. Presby- 
terians, Baptists, Independents, all the new Sects, and 
the Politicians, were striving to make a new Church of 
England. George Fox came into the midst of their con- 
fusions with this Catholic message : Christ has not 
formed His Kingdom on the nature of Englishmen, but 
of men: the re-formation of His Kingdom, the second 
building up of His universal Temple, cannot begin in a 
Parliament House ; it must begin in the court of Con- 
science. 

ix. These truths bore a witness against the notion that 
the hierarchy, or ministers, are the organs of the Holy 
Ghost in the Church, against the real or implicit division 
of the Body of Christ into the Church and the Faithful.* 

* Saint Cyprian, whom certainly no one would accuse of 
undervaluing the Priestly Office or Episcopal Order, insists 
often on the Priestly character of every Christian. He declares 
ho will do nothing without the Laity ; that it has been his 



52 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

The whole Body is the Church, the whole Body is the 
Faithful, the whole Body is the organ of the Holy Ghost ; 
every man in it is inspired by Him, by virtue of his per- 
sonal human union to the Divine Word — by virtue of the 
Incarnation of the Word of God in all flesh — by virtue 
of his Baptism. The ministry is set apart to teach the 
ignorant and convert the heathen, to build up the Saints, 
to direct consciences, to declare God's absolution, to offer 
the Christian Sacrifice. But the whole Body has the In- 
spiring Spirit of Grace to labor for the purification and 
extension of the Church. Aptitude of learning proceeds 
from the Spirit as much as aptitude of teaching. It is 
the same Grace in another condition.* To every baptized 
Corinthian, St. Paul says : " Your body is the temple of 
the Holy Ghost, who dwelleth in you."f 

principle from the beginning : "A primordio Episcopatus mei 
statuerim nihil sine consilio vestro, et sine consensu plebis, mea pri- 
vatim sententia gerere. Sed cum ad vos per Dei gratiam 
venero, tunc de iis quae vel gesta sunt vel gerenda, sicut 
honor mutuus poscit in commune tractabimus." — Editio D. A. B. 
Caillau, ep. v. p. 33. Parisiis, 1842. Oxford Translation, ep. 
xiv. p. 37. 

* Saint Cyprian exhorts all the laity to use that gift of 
teaching which they have toward individuals. — Ed. Caillau, ep. 
xi. pp. 53-55. Ed. Oxf. ep. xvii. pp. 43, 44. 

f 1 Corinthians vi. 19. 



CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 53 



CHAPTER V. 

THE REFLECTION OF THE QUAKER IDEA IN MODERN 
QUAKERISM. 

i. Loss of Principles by Decay and by Modification, 
ii. The Revival of a Sect in Religion not necessarily a Re- 
vival of the Principle of the Sect — Quakers and the 
Evangelical Revival, 
iii. Are the Catholic Principles of Quakers revived ? — Are the 

Quaker Enthusiasms? 
iv. Both doubted or contradicted by Modern Quakerism, 
v. Doubt and Contradiction agents of Decay, 
vi. Witness of Ancient and Modern Quakers, 
vii. Witness of Ancient Quakers against every Appearance of 

Evil — Against the Evil Principle, 
viii. Witness of Modern Quakers against certain real and sup- 
posed Evils—Its Traditionalism and Externality. 
ix. Accidental Likeness, Essential Dissimilarity of the Ancient 

and Modern Witness. 
x. Ancient Quakers witnessed to the Presence of the Divine 

Word in Men. 
xi. Modern Quakers witness to certain Duties — Philan- 
thropists and " Lovers of Men." 
xii. The Ancient Quaker Witness does not necessarily involve 

Quakerism, 
xiii. Quakerism hinders and contradicts that Witness — Tran- 
sition to the Second Book. 



1. 



The principles of which I have spoken as the Divine 



54 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

Root of Quakerism (an outward realization of which it 
was the aim of the Quaker theology to express, and of 
the Quaker Church to spread) have been displaced, modi- 
fied, explained away, contradicted by many generations 
of Quakers. Much was lost in the scholastic or formal 
epoch of the Society ; much more in the general religious 
declension of the eighteenth century. 

ii. The revival of a Sect, so far as it means the repro- 
duction of that life which has decayed, and not the re- 
vival of religious feeling in the Sect, is a very rare event. 
When it does occur, it leaves the Sect quite another thing 
than it originally contemplated. In the eighteenth cen- 
tury, Quakerism passed, with the other Sects, and with 
the Church, through a period of religious darkness, and 
suffered from the epidemic of scepticism and empty laxity. 
With the other religious bodies, Quakerism underwent a 
revival. But this was a revival of its religion, not of its 
Quakerism. It reappeared as a mild Arminian-Evan- 
gelical system ; its members differing from the members 
of other such systems chiefly in having no rites, no paid 
ministers, in not taking oaths, in not entering the army, 
in not following the changes of fashion, and a few other 
external peculiarities. It is since the Evangelical Revival 
that the decay of Quakerism has more determinedly set 
in. A time of general distrust of the grounds of all reli- 
gion is not necessarily a time of the decay of Sects. 
When men scarcely believe anything, they do not think 
it worth their while to disturb their daily wont of life ; 
and they go easily and contentedly where their fathers 
took them. 



CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 55 

iii. When we hold up the Mirror of Modern Quaker- 
ism to the Idea of Ancient Quakerism (as I have spoken 
of that Idea in the prior chapters), two questions occur 
in relation to the two Catholic Principles. First, Do 
modern Quakers believe in the Saving Light of Christ 
ill every man ? Secondly, Do modern Quakers believe 
that the only Catholic Church must be a Universal Society 
of Spirits, bound together by the indwelling of the Com- 
mon Spirit of Christ, into which men are admitted by 
the Baptism of Christ, and which exerts itself in the 
reduction of all men to that Baptism ? 

Two questions also arise respecting those two Quaker 
Enthusiasms which the Primitive Friends confounded 
with, and substituted for, the Catholic Truths. First, Do 
modern Quakers believe that every man or woman who 
consciously submits to the Light of the Lord in their 
spirits, must, by the irresistible power of that Lord, be 
drawn into communion and fellowship with " the people of 
God, called Quakers" ? Secondly, Do modern Quakers be- 
lieve that the Society of Friends is the One Holy Catholic 
and Apostolic Church, and that every other religious 
body in the world is a section of the predicted Apostacy ? 

iv. If the word "modern" were left out of these four 
queries, and they had been put to any primitive Quaker, 
he would have answered them all in the affirmative. All 
modern Quakers, and all persons conversant with modern 
Quaker opinion, would answer them in the negative. Or, 
if they said ' Yes' to them, they would affix some qualifi- 
cation which would render them virtually negative ; such 
as, ' We believe in these as the Society believes ;' that is, 



56 THE PKCULIUM. [BOOK I. 

in some interpretation of the ancient words, more destruc- 
tive to the two Catholic truths and the two Quaker 
opinions, than absolute denial of them would be. 

v. If I could answer * Yes' to all or any of these ques- 
tions, I should doubt both the clear statements of statis- 
ticians, and the self-deploring Jeremiads in which Quakers 
have lamented the decay of Quakerism. I should think 
a restoration possible, for a while longer. As I believe 
that all these questions must be answered in the negative, 
so I believe that the restoration of Quakerism is impossible. 
For, since undoubting faith in these two Catholic Principles 
and these two Quaker Persuasions was the condition of 
Quaker vigor and success ; so the disbelief, half-belief, or 
doubt of these, is the sure condition of Quaker decay ; as 
I hope to make more manifest in the further development 
of this subject. 

vi. I have spoken, in the prior chapters, of the witness 
which was borne by primitive Quakerism against the ex- 
isting Church, Sects, and World. Of course, from the 
exclusive standpoint of the Quaker Church, these were 
only regarded as three different forms which the common 
spirit of the World chose to assume for worldly purposes. 
Though a Quaker of the seventeenth century and one of 
the nineteenth would not be able to agree in their exten- 
sion and restriction of the term World, they would agree 
in this, that Quakers were called out from the World to 
bear a witness against it and for it. But question them 
as to what this witness is, and we shall have opposite 
answers. There is an absolute distinction of principle 
between the witness of ancient and modern Quakerism. 



CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 57 

vii. If we could call up a Quaker of the earlier period, 
and question him what the witness of his Society really 
was (and in the Quaker books we may call many up, and 
so question them), he would answer (as they answer), 
1 We are witnesses to this : God has come to teach His 
People Himself; Christ has given to the Humankind His 
Light and Spirit, and is reproving them of righteousness, 
of judgment, and of sin.' This was the positive form of 
their witness. Its negative and antagonist phase, there- 
fore, was not against mere evils, but against the very 
source and spring of evils — against the dark principle of 
perpetual forgetfulness of the presence of God — against 
the unruly principle of perpetual resistance to His stirring 
Light and Word — against the very sinfulness of Sin. 

viii. Ask a modern Quaker what is the witness which 
has been committed to his Society, and he will answer 
(the books, letters, memoirs, advices of modern Friends 
supply the answer), ' We are witnesses for the Spirituality 
of the Kingdom of Christ ; we are an example of the 
Christian Church in its simplicity V Press him closely for, 
a definition of Spirituality and of Simplicity, and we shall 
be answered by a set of negatives : ' We have no forms, we 
do not pay our ministers, we count no buildings sacred ;' 
and so on. If further pushed, and reminded that Spiritu- 
ality cannot consist in these negatives, he will answer, 
perhaps, that they are the fences of Spirituality. 

ix. The essential difference between early and later 
Quaker witness is less apparent at first glance, from its 
accidental likeness. The modern Quakers might say, 
' Our fathers (whom you believe to have witnessed to 



58 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

something positive) had bald forms of worship; they 
scrupulously anathematized set prayers, the payment of 
ministers, the sanctifying of buildings, and so on ; there- 
fore, we are keeping in continuity their witness. 7 But it 
is very plain from the rousing language of Fox, Bur- 
roughs, and the rest, that their hypothesis for rejecting 
forms stood upon quite an opposite ground to that of their 
disciples. ■ God,' they would say, ' is the true Teacher of 
His People ; He is the Spirit Who animates and creates 
true forms, where, when, or as, forms are wanted : how can 
we want set forms, when we have the Form-Creator and 
Form-Inspirer in the midst of us ; if they were not in- 
sulting, they would be unnecessary? 7 Again, they might 
say, ■ Our Teacher gives His precious Wisdom without 
money and without price ; our ministers are but the in- 
struments and organs through which His Word passes ; 
how could we dare to pay them, or they to receive, money 
for what is not theirs, but the Holy Ghost's? 7 Thus, 
the old Quakers began, not at the forms, but at the Uni- 
versal Presence of the Divine Teacher. 

Modern Quakers, on the contrary, begin at the forms. 
'Forms, 7 they say. 'are the mere organs of the Divine 
Spirit. They are dead and empty in themselves. We 
may have what seem to be the noblest and most venera- 
ble forms, and yet not have His Divine Presence. We 
do not want dead and empty things ; we want the living, 
life-creating Spirit. All Sects but ourselves, more or 
less, substitute forms for the Spirit ; or, at best, seek the 
Spirit through forms — through the Bible, hymns, and 
prepared sermons. We put away all forms, therefore we 



CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 59 

cannot make this substitution. J Thus the modern witness 
is a witness against formality, or for spirituality, not a 
witness to the Presence of a Divine Lord and Teacher. 
u No Forms" is but formal, after all ; and the poor Irish- 
man, going in for a few minutes to kneel in silence before 
the Altar whereupon he believes the Yery Flesh is lying, 
Which was beaten in Pilate's Judgment-hall, and pierced 
upon Calvary, may be intensely more spiritual than all the 
Quakers in the barest (most spiritual) meeting-house that 
ever was built; nay, he may be more firmly bound, in the 
unity of the Spirit, with George Fox and Isaac Pening- 
ton, than the people who wear the same kind of clothes, 
and use "thee" and "thou" by imitation. 

x. Yet this is not the only testimony upon which mod- 
ern Quakers claim honor. They have borne the greatest 
witness for Philanthropy as a necessary element of the 
Christian character. Their witness against War, Slavery, 
Drunkenness, and other Evils, as enemies of mankind, has 
been (considering their fewness in number, and absorbing 
commercial habits) the most extraordinary and persistent 
made by any body of Christians. They have had a bright 
name as Philanthropists, ever since that fine name and 
new profession appeared in England. In the eyes of half 
our countrymen of the present day the first characteristic 
suggested by the name Quaker, is, Philanthropist — a 
good-hearted, placid rich man, whose profession is to do 
good ; just as two hundred years ago the invariable char- 
acteristic would have been Enthusiast — a wild, oddly-clad 
man, whose profession was to travel about, opposing, con- 
tradicting, witnessing, in the most extravagant methods. 



60 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK I. 

xi. As Philanthropoi, lovers of men, they are in a di- 
rect continuity and succession to George Fox and the 
first Quakers. The development or change is the same 
also. The unbending faith of Fox, and his fellows, that 
the Spirit of Christ, their own Lord, the Beloved of 
their own souls, was in some sense inhabiting every man's 
conscience, gave them an awful sympathy with all states 
and conditions of men, a mighty hatred to all Man's ene- 
mies. It was because they saw that the Seed of Christ 
in men was crushed and insulted by War, Slavery, or 
Drunkenness, that these were witnessed against by them. 
For, what is War ? A man resisting the uniting Spirit 
of Christ in himself, the pleading image of Christ in 
another, and rushing to murder by the inspiration of the 
unchristly spirit of Wrath. What is Slavery ? Making 
a chattel, a thing, of one in whom the free Spirit and 
Light of Christ is speaking and shining. What is 
Drunkenness ? A man drowning the Seed of Christ in 
him under gross and beastly self-indulgence, resisting the 
will of the Spirit, submitting to the animal will. Thus 
the old Quaker philanthropy, as a witness against these 
evils, beginning at the perpetual remembrance of the 
presence of the Divine Light within, was a protest against 
the very root and principle of these evils, against the sin 
and atheism of them, against the forgetfulness of and un- 
belief in that Light. 

But the modern Quaker witness is made against the 
evils themselves. The Quakers have a kind of hereditary 
duty to perform, a set of works left them to continue, the 
calling of philanthropists to take up. It is good for 



CHAP. V.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 61 

mankind that it is so — in the lack of better things. But 
how do they do it ? By Peace Societies, Abolition Soci- 
eties, Temperance Societies. George Fox and his fellows 
would have marched forth and preached to the faces and 
to the hearts of soldiers, of slaveowners, and drunkards. 
They would have said, ( Thus saith the Lord, This word 
do I send to your consciences by the mouth of My ser- 
vants, Thou shalt not hate thy brother ; Thou shalt not 
make thy brother a thing ; Thou shalt not bring thyself 
down to the place of a brute. Thou knowest the Light 
Who is in thee showeth thee this ; thou knowest there is 
That Which is calling upon thee to sacrifice thyself, to 
crucify that inward rebellious w r ill of thine which would 
make thee a murderer, an oppressor, a drunkard.' 

xii. I believe this witness is true. But it is a message 
which no more involves Manchester Peace doctrine, or 
Teetotalism, than that prior witness of the Presence of 
the Spirit Who is above all forms and ceremonies, in- 
volves the rejection of the Sacraments and Orders of the 
Catholic Church. Yea, and as we saw before, the essence 
of this witness, the unselfish sacrifice of the will, may be 
accomplished by a soldier, on a battle-field, in a truer 
sense than by the eloquent speaker for the Peace Society, 
on a platform ; even by a paternal slaveholder (for such 
there are, difficult and rare to find, perhaps,) more truly 
than by a violent party abolitionist ; by a sober user of 
wine, than by an intemperate and bigoted abstainer. 
Leaving out such possibilities, what a different witness it 
is to that of speakers and writers for No-war, Abolition, 
and Teetotalism ; to those platform, bazaar, and fancy-fair 



82 THE PECULITJM. [BOOK I. 

methods, by which ladies and gentlemen are attempting 
to help forward the Kingdom of God. 

xiii. Not only does the primitive Quaker witness (the 
Truth which George Fox and his fellows perceived) not 
involve Quakerism (the Schism, the Institution, which 
they made to contain and manifest that witness); but, on 
the contrary, the Quaker-Ism hampers and contradicts 
that witness. I shall endeavor to throw further light 
upon this, in the next book, where I propose to examine 
the factors and the elements of that Schism or Institution. 



BOOK II. 

THE QUAKER SCHISM; OR, FORMAL QUAKERISM. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE DIVINE ELEMENT, OR CONTRIBUTION, IN QUAKERISM. 

i. Introductory. 
ii. The three Factors : The holy Spirit, the Human Founder, 

the Age — These Three give Elements to Quakerism. 
iii. The Divine Element subject of this Chapter — How the 
Head of a Universal Body gives His Spirit to a detached 
Schism ; to Quakerism — A Sect in success. 
iv. A Schism may decay, although it has a Divine Principle of 

Life — A Sect in decline. 
v. A Schism may decay because it has only one, two, or 

more, not all the Divine Elements of a Catholic Body, 
vi. History of Quakerism— Music divinely appointed — Effect 

of Quaker prohibition of Music, 
vii. A Schism may decay by its Principle of Life returning to 
its Catholic Centre. 

i. Does the original form or completed body of Quak- 
erism throw any light on the causes of Quaker decay ? 
This is the question which I shall attempt to answer in 
the Second Book 

(63) 



64 THE PECULTUM. [BOOK II. 

The way to the answer lies, I think, through another 
question : — Who were the primary makers or causers of 
Quakerism ? What were the leading and distinctive ele- 
ments or contributions in the formal finished Sect, the 
completed Institution ? 

ii. I believe they were these three : — First, the Divine 
Sower gave them, as the Seed of His Word and Spirit, 
that temporarily forgotten or depressed principle of which 
I have spoken in the First Book. Secondly, the early 
proclaimers of this principle, especially George Fox, 
raised up a Christian movement and institution upon it, 
of which their consciences, their opinions, their wisdom, 
their ignorance, their temperaments, their sufferings, were 
the builders. Thirdly, the spirit of the Age, acting upon 
George Fox and his fellows, and upon their work, stamped 
it with its own secular characteristics, marked it with the 
peculiarities of the seventeenth century. 

iii. The history of a Sect during its success, is the 
record of its proclamation of some Catholic principle 
which the Catholic Church is leaving unspoken, unde- 
clared. For, as surely as, by the Incarnation, the Blessed 
Word and Son of the Father took upon Him the nature 
of every man, so surely is man's soul Catholic by its very 
nature, and thirsts after a Catholic food ; which food, by 
some method or another, God is sure to supply. 

This doctrine is no private judgment, but the clear and 
legitimate deduction from the conduct of our Lord Him- 
self, when He was called upon by the very Princes of the 
Church, to give verdict in a case of schism. "And John 
answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out 



CHAP. I.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 65 

devils in Thy Name, and he followeth not us : and we for- 
bade him, because he followeth not us. But Jesus said, 
Forbid him not : for there is no man which shall do a 
miracle in My Name, that can lightly speak evil of Me. 
For he that is not against us is on our part."* Our Lord 
does not here say, ' Since he does My will, since he wit- 
nesses to My rule over evil spirits, and to My work of 
freeing human spirits, since he really casts out devils, he 
is as much an apostle as any one of you; perhaps more 
so, since, when I was on the Mount of Transfiguration, 
and you were prayed to cast out devils, you could not 
cast them out.' This is not what our Lord said ; this is 
what the Founders of Sects say. But He goes to the 
broad ground of self-sacrifice. They had just been quar- 
relling about dignity and degree ; He had set a child in 
the midst of them. He goes on to show that to do things 
in His name, not in their own, is the secret of power, the 
spring and source of all Divine work. When they, the 
Church which He has called, and which He owns, think 
little of themselves, they will find His strength in them. 
Meantime God must, God will, have His work done. If 
the Universal Society which His Son began, which He 
guided, and to which He taught "the inward sense of all 
things, does not advance His truth and work, some other 
Society will, and will do it with the sanction and Name 
of God. But this affords no excuse for Sect-making, for 
separating from the Church ; since, even when our Lord 
was openly in the midst of them, a man was found who 
could cast out devils, while the Apostolic College could 
* St. Mark ix. 38-40. 
5 



66 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

not. Yet our Lord neither ordained him an Apostle, nor 
cast off the Twelve as apostates. So, too, this act of our 
Lord forbids the Church to anathematize or restrain any 
man who is speaking His truth or doing His will, though 
not in outward union with herself. If the Church had al- 
ways translated this principle into practice, how many 
Sects had been cut short in their beginning, how many 
had been unnecessary ! It is as unchurchly as it is weak 
and mischievous, to take the Papist ground when arguing 
with sectarians, to tell them that they are wholly wrong, 
and we wholly right. If the Church had not lost faith, 
had not sinned, there would be no Sects. One who was 
a very noble asserter of the authority of the Church, 
says : " He that can look upon the mischiefs either of 
civil war in the world, or schism in the Church, with the 
heart of a Christian, will not think strange that both 
should be schismatics to God, though only one part can 
be schismatics to the Church."* 

iv. The histo/y of Sects in their decline, is the record 
of continual approximation from points of difference to 
points of likeness with the Catholic Church. At every 
step, some individualist (that is, some Foxite, Wesleyan, 
Ignatian, Lutheran, Calvinist) element is dropped ; some 
universal, human, spiritual element is taken up. All 
the while, these Sects feel themselves in the way of pro- 
gress, and say they are so. And so they are, in so far as 
one Baptism as the process, one Body as the goal, are to 

* Herbert Thorndike, Just Weights and Measures, ch. ii. s. 6, 
[Works, p. 87, vol. v. Oxford ed. 1854.] A Treatise written 
during the most nourishing period of Quakerism's life. 



CHAP. I.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 67 

be added to the common starting-point — one Lord. Bat 
in regard to themselves, as Sects, they are not in progress. 
Every step forward is a step into self-destruction. No 
age hitherto has been so full of the signs of this approxi- 
mation as our own ; the very outside of our places of 
worship preaches it to men in the street; the growing 
discovery that the Holy Ghost did not forsake the world 
from the death of St. Augustine to the birth of Wycliffe, 
preaches it to men in the study. The disseverance of a 
Sect is a witness that God will judge the Church, that 
her Lord is a Righteous King. The decline of Sects is 
a witness that He will vindicate her as the only Catholic 
witness to Himself; that is, as the only power in the 
world which can speak to every time, in every place, to 
every man, to every business. 

v. There is also only one condition upon which even a 
true principle, a seed of God, can maintain perpetual 
life. It must live in union with all the other principles 
of the Nature and Kingdom of God ; it must not be 
severed from them ; it must not come into any contact of 
opposition with them. 

Now the history of Quakerism is a continual record of 
such oppositions, and of the fierce, self-destructive battles 
which have resulted from them. I might instance this by 
the slight, doubting, wavering manner in which the early 
Quakers viewed that principle which might be called the 
Gospel, I mean the awful fact of the Incarnation. But 
as I shall have to speak of this afterwards, I will use a 
more ordinary illustration now. 

vi. Music is a science founded, just as much as theology 



68 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

is, on the principles of the Divine Nature and order. It 
is regulated by divinely arranged laws, of which Discord 
is the violation ; to the truth of which all musical and 
musically cultivated souls are witnesses. The need of 
music is sown deeply in the souls of men by God their 
Maker. When men are seeking, hearing, playing — above 
all, discovering or composing — true music, they are obey- 
ing a law which they were not meant to resist. The 
Quakers have put a prohibition of music upon their books. 
This prohibition stands upon no mean or meagre ground. 
Some of the early Quakers, the most Quakerly of them, 
pronounced all music unlawful ; others pronounced good 
music inconvenient, for the sake of its associations with 
hunting, drinking, play-acting, love, war; and bad music 
is unlawful for its own sake. They had a good reason to 
give for it ; they could trace it up, in their own way, to 
the very principle which they had received from Christ 
their Light. Here, then, are two principles, both from 
the Divine Centre, in contest and opposition. If the 
Society of Friends were the Catholic Kingdom of God, 
both could find their truest centre and harmony therein ; 
Quaker music would be the grandest that was ever com- 
posed. But since both cannot exist together under 
Quaker conditions, Quakerism cannot be the Universal 
Kingdom for men, for it must exclude musical men: it 
cannot be a kingdom for all places and times, for it cannot 
bless and sanctify the concert-room or the singing party. 
The same contest may be seen in the Drama and in the 
Arts. The prohibitions of the Quaker discipline (as I 
shall try to show when I come to that head), are the sen- 



CHAP. I.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 69 

tences of death which Quakerism records against itself — 
are witnesses that the Divine Principle is given it with 
restrictions, as to places, as to times, as to men, as to 
pursuits. 

vii. Lastly. A Sect may decay because its principle 
again finds a home in its true centre ; because its witness 
is taken from it by the Catholic Church returning to her 
duty. When the Truth and the Life are received again 
into the City which drove them forth, men will resort no 
more to those caves where they once hid. Before George 
Fox was born, the two principles which he made the basis 
of a phantasmal and expected Catholic Church, were the 
principles of the really existing Catholic Church. 



70 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE FOXITE CONTRIBUTION. 

i. The Founders of Schisms — George Fox as Founder of Quak- 
erism, 
ii. In what sense he was not the Founder — The other Founaers, 
iii. The Movement began in Fox's soul — Josiah Martin to 

Voltaire. 
iv. Quaker objections — The Divine Word the Founder, 
v. Quakerism is Foxism — Fox built himself into it. 
vi. Fox's Proclamation of the Light Within drew out the 

unexpressed Quakerism of the Age. 
vii. His private Experience the productive Cause of this 

Proclamation, 
viii. Tenets of Quakerism, the Deductions of George Fox, 
ix. Symbols of Quakerism — George Fox's Methods of distin- 
guishing the Church from the World. 
x. Proved inefficacy of his Methods — George Fox unfitted for 

the Reformer of a Universal Society, 
xi. Only an Omniscient Man fitted, the Incarnate Word — 

George Fox's Method the contrary to His. 
xii. Decay of Quakerism, as Foxism, inevitable from the most 
universal evidence within our reach. 

i. I have said that the first element in the constitution 
of a Schism usually consists in some Divine principle per- 



CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 71 

ceived by its founders, some truth of God which men are 
needing and feeling after at that time, and which the 
merciful Father is sure to reveal. The second element 
is that contributed by the Founder or Founders. And 
the Founder is not that man who first discerned that 
principle or truth upon which the formal building is 
raised, but he who effected the most toward raising and 
forming the building. It is so in the Physical Kingdom; 
they who first discern the new truth are not accounted the 
discoverers, but they who substantiate, settle, and hand it 
over to mankind as an available possession for ever. All 
those great epochs marked by the characteristics of certain 
strong spirits, were prepared for the reception and arrival 
of those spirits, by men of clear discernment, perhaps of 
untiring labor, but held back, thwarted, misunderstood ; 
testifying in an undertone, because " the time was not yet 
come." In the specific instance of Quakerism, this gene- 
ral law holds good. The master-spirit and chief builder 
of Quakerism was, undoubtedly, George Fox. But there 
had been Quakers before him. 

ii. The Society of Friends, from the very first, have 
shrunk back from calling George Fox their founder. 
Their usual designation of him is, " our honorable elder;" 
and they speak of him only as one among many. In a 
sense, they are justified in doing so ; for James Naylor, 
William Dewsbury, Richard Farnsworth, Francis How- 
gill, Edward Burroughs, and a few others, labored quite 
as hard in the first onslaught of the Quaker theory upon 
the Church, World, and Sects ; and conduced nearly as 



72 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

much to the multitudinous conversions of the prse-formal 
period of Quakerism. 

iii. Yet, even confining ourselves to the mere origina- 
tion of the new movement, this truth faces us in a most 
plain, open, inescapable manner, that it was a movement 
which began in the soul of George Fox. When we come 
to the second period, to the modelling of the Quaker 
constitution and discipline, to the Society of Friends, to 
Quakerism as an Ism, the hand of George Fox is still 
more evident. His fellows in the period of success and 
conquest were all either dead ; or in some hyper-Quaker 
Schism, as Perrot and Pennyman ; or, with himself, were 
milder, less expectant, more orderly men. Both his own 
Journal and SewelPs History connect Quakerism with 
him, as intimately as Arianism can be connected with 
Arius, Lutheranism with Luther, Wesleyanism with Wes- 
ley, or any of the Gnostic Sects with the personal names 
they are distinguished by.' " He not only," says Josiah 
Martin to Yoltaire, " converted thousands to his senti- 
ments and opinions, but was also the author of the scheme 
or plan of discipline by which the Quakers regulate their 
Society, and which he himself saw established in England, 
Scotland, Ireland, Holland, and America : a plan, though 
simple in its nature, yet very extensive in its service, yea, 
so extensive as to be capable of taking in even the whole 
world ; and if strictly followed by all, according to the 
spirit and intent of its author, would, to use thy own 
words, ' bring down upon earth the so-much boasted 
golden age.' "* 

* Letter from one of the People called Quakers to F. de Voltaire 



CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 73 

iv. The early Quakers avoided thus nicknaming their 
Society and opinions, not only because George Fox him- 
self would have hated it above every thing, but also be- 
cause it could never have represented to themselves or the 
world, in the least degree, what they believed that Society 
and those opinions really involved. Indeed, the name 
Foxism would have presented the very opposite. For it 
was the faith of Fox and his fellows that their Society 
was the one only Holy and Elect Church, called out of 
the long Apostasy of Ages ; holding no opinions, following 
no man ; but grounded upon, and bound together by, the 
Divine Principle of the Life and Light of Christ dwell- 
ing and working in every member. No one, I think, 
could read George Fox's Journal, or any of his tracts, 
without concluding, that if he suspected any thing he held 
to be an opinion, he would have thrown it away at once, 
as far from him as possible. 

v. Nevertheless, we, in the placid calm and quietness 
of historical distance, losing sight of small distinctions, 
perceive that Quakerism is, essentially, Foxism. It may 
be, I think it is, the growth of some living Truth, which 
grows quite independently of him : it may be, I think it 
is, the germination from a Divine Seed. But still, if I 
may say so, Fox is the gardener. It is he who fixes it 
to this or that wall ; he who moves the trellis for it, first 
here, then there ; it is he who allows it to develop freely 

[London, 8vo., 1742, p. 41.] He, William Penn says, was 
"the Instrumental Author: He that in this age was sent to 
begin this Work and People."— Preface to George Fox^s Journal. 
[Fol. Lond. 1694.] 



74 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

toward the south or east, but clips every branch or spray 
that aims westward ; it is he who makes such fanciful 
frames and espalier rails for the young and tender tendrils 
to enfold and cover. Albeit, during all his trainings, 
clippings, waterings of that which he believed to be 
God's Tree of Life, it must be remembered that he did 
all in the belief that he was receiving perceptible and im- 
mediate suggestions and commands from the Lord. Each 
twig which was clipped, or suffered to grow ; each nail 
which was driven in, was clipped, suffered, driven in, as 
he believed, in obedience to the direct command of the 
Light of Christ. 

I shall now give some examples to show that Quakerism 
really is Foxism, — that Fox built up himself, his tempera- 
ment, his experiences, his fancies, his knowledge, his 
ignorance, into that outward body of doctrine, constitu- 
tion, and discipline, by which the successive fact Quaker- 
ism continues in the world. 

vi. First, it is most probable that this body would 
never have existed as a separate formal institution, had it 
not been for George Fox. The great mass of Seekers in 
all parts of England, who were, so to speak, the raw ma- 
terial which was afterwards built up into Quakerism,* 

* Wm. Sewell, History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of 
the Christian People called Quakers, [fol. Lond. 1722, p. 6.] And 
even the worse sect of the Ranters were purified, in many 
places, into Quakers. See also William Penn's Preface to 
Fox's Journal. Further, John Crook's Epistle to all that profess 
the Light of Jesus Christ within to be their Guide. " For you 
know many of us, before we received the truth as it is in 



CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 75 

were aggregated and built up by George Fox. It was 
through his mission, that their own dim apprehensions 
and semi-discoveries were clenched and perfected, gained 
a shape and name. Through his mission — I will not say 
they learnt that they were inwardly related by their con- 
stitution as human beings to the Divine Word — but they 
learnt 'how to give it a doctrinal utterance, — they learnt 
how to use that awful central truth as God's weapon for 
the reformation of themselves and of the Church, and the 
reduction of the World into the Kingdom of His Son. 
By Fox's mission they were given a centre, were drawn 
together ; by it a great veil was taken away, and they 
perceived that they had all along been seeking in a 
Common Spirit a common end ; that they were not mere 
individuals, but parts and members of a common body. 
Hence his mission was the magnetic and formative prin- 
ciple of Quakerism. 

vii. And what was the producing cause of this mission ? 

Jesus, felt some stirrings of life, and therefore separated in 
our judgments and opinions from the generality of our neigh- 
bors and countrymen where we dwelt ; because of an inward 
cry from a deep want in our souls, and a hungering after the 
constant enjoyment of that which we with many others pos- 
sessed, but could not find in any thing under the sun." [4to., 
London, 1678.] John Crook was a Justice of the Peace, in 
Bedfordshire. His first tract, written 1659, was against 
Tithes. In this Epistle, 1678, he takes already, though Quak- 
erism was not yet , thirty years old, a traditional ground, and 
talks of decline and loss. Even in the beginning of 1647, 
George Fox says, " I met with some friendly people." [Jbwr- 
nal, p. 6, fol. ed. 1694.] 



76 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

George Pox's own personal experience.* He came to 
the Light of the Divine Word, in himself; he found his 
evil deeds shown him and reproved. He obeyed the Light 
of the Divine Word in himself; he found his evil deeds, 
his very will to evil, mortified and arrested. He connect- 
ed this process with his nature, as a member of an Elect 
Redeemed Humankind, for which the Heavenly Father 
cared, for which Christ died : not as an individual picked 
by authoritative and reasonless favor from a Reprobated 
Humankind, for which God did.not care, for which Christ 
had not died. In other words, he felt that the illumina- 
tion, reproof, and help of the Light belonged to him as a 
man.-f Therefore he felt free to go up and down the 
world, proclaiming God's Grace within man to every hu* 
man creature. 

viii. And what are the catechetical doctrines and tenets 
of Quakerism ? The inferences and deductions of George 
Fox from the Principle. So soon as he realized the voice 
of Christ in the conscience, the indwelling of the Spirit 
in the Saints, the unity of the Church through that in- 
dwelling, the spirituality of the Redeemed Society, he 
began to connect these truths with all the distracting evils 

* " The Lord in that day opened these things unto me in secret; 
they have since been published by His Eternal Spirit, as on 
the house-top."— Journal, 1647, [p. 11, fol. ed. 1694.] 

f "I cried unto the Lord saying. Why should I be thus, 
seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils ? And the 
Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all 
conditions ; how else should I speak to all conditions ? And 
in this I saw the infinite love of God." — Journal, 1647, p. 13. 



CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 77 

which he saw, heard, suffered from, in the Church and 
World. Every peculiarity of the Quaker constitution, its 
tenets, its habits, the symbols by which it endeavored 
to distinguish its members from the World, had been in- 
sisted upon by some person or another, in some Christian 
Schism or another, long before George Fox. The non- 
payment of the ministry for ecclesiastical offices had been 
witnessed to by Jesuits ; the wearing of a peculiar dress 
in order to distinguish the Holy Body from the World, 
had been witnessed to by all orders of monks and nuns ; 
the silent waiting, by many Mystics. Some of their te- 
nets were the floating notions of the ultra Puritans ; as, 
for instance, the forbidding of the use of mourning habits 
and grave stones by the Holy Body. The confused delu- 
sion of a Society of sinless men, ol xaOapol, had visited the 
Novatians, and a perpetual succession of schismatics. 
But all these, and many more, passed through the alembic 
of Fox's own mind, before they were built up into their 
place in the Quaker constitution. To those which he de- 
rived from the religious World around him, to those which 
he drew from that " righteous Christer," his father, and 
from the shepherd his lere-father, he gave a new intensity 
and use, by interpreting them in his central idea, the Di- 
vine Light. Those which had been witnessed to by elder 
Sects, he did not derive from Ecclesiastical History ; for 
when he began his mission he was unacquainted with it ; 
and when he got some smatterings of it in later life, he 
used it, as he used the beginning of Ecclesiastical History 
in the New Testament, not for the discovery of the truth, 
but for the confirmation of what he believed to be the 



78 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

truth. If he had known any thing of the history of 
Schisms, this knowledge would have given another direc- 
tion to the Quaker movement. For whatever he had, 
he built into this system. Having ignorance of Ecclesi- 
astical History (which is the real record of God's judg- 
ment upon the Church and Sects), he built that ignorance 
into the Quaker constitution. 

ix. What are those outward symbols and badges by 
which for two hundred years Quakers have been distin- 
guished from the general mass of men ? They are George 
Fox J s forms ; they are his methods of marking the chil- 
dren of the Light from the children of the Apostasy. It 
was because George Fox saw that men and women under 
the Apostasy were saying " Good morning" and " Good 
evening" to persons to whom they really wished wretched 
days and wretched nights ; because George Fox heard 
men and women telling folk whom they hated the sight of, 
how glad they were to see them, that he declared the 
children of Light were " forbidden to use the World's hy- 
pocritical salutations."* At this day a Quaker does not 
say " Good bye" to me (God abide with you), because 
two hundred years ago a holy man came across many 
people who said these true-hearted words without the 
true heart And yet if I part with a Quaker he will say 
" Farewell" to me, which means the same thing. But 
what constraining moral power is there in this Quaker 
form of wishing good which is lacking in other forms of 
wishing good ? Is it less possible for a man to wish me 

* Concerning Good Morrow and Good Even; the World's Hypo- 
critical Salutations. [4to., London, 1657, p. 14.] 



CHAP. IT.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 79 

ill when he says "Farewell" than to wish me a bad night 
when he says " Good night ?" Two hundred years have 
proved that the substitution of " Thou" and " Thee" for you 
has been as vain and inutile. That " Thou" may be the very 
vehicle of worldly flattery it was intended to be a charm 
against, was made evident so early as Sewell's dedication 
of his History to George the First.* If he would not 
take off his hat to the King, the whole spirit of hat-wor- 
ship is in his preface. If any Quaker of the first age had 
had to address George the First he would most probably 
have ordered him to repent of his whoredoms and adulte- 
ries, to put aside his harlots, and reconcile himself to his 
own son. 

x. Can such distinctions be the marks by which we are 
to tell the Church from the World ? No : the preserva- 
tion of such distinctions is a sign that George Fox built 
up himself, his notions, his provisions, into the Quaker 
constitution. Such distinctions are signs that he was not 
enabled to watch the universal working of the Word of 
God in the History of the World, with the same intensity, 
faithfulness, clearness, and good use, with which he 
watched His particular working in his own soul. They 
are signs that he was setting about a work which no mere 
man can do — that of becoming a root and branch re- 
former of the Church. For the belief that reform is 
needed, involves the confession that the worldly principle 

* " Great and Mighty Prince! 1 ' — so it begins. Compare the 
beginnings of George Fox's Epistles to Charles II. of England, 
and to Johannes III. of Poland. u King Charles! King! 
Friend, who art the chief ruler of these dominions," &c. 



80 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

has entered into the Church ; and if so, reformation must 
be a casting out of the worldly principle, a redivision of 
the Church and the World, a remaking of the Church. 
This is what George Fox believed Quakerism was doing. 
The completed Quaker Body was to be the New Jerusa- 
lem, the real and ultimate Peculium. But no man can do 
this work of thorough purgation and edification unless he 
can see into every conscience, into all places, at all times. 
In other words, only One Man can do it — the Lord from 
Heaven, Who wrought the reformation in George Fox's 
heart, Who cast the world out of it, and built it up in 
His own image. 

xi. Did George Fox carry on his own work as a re- 
former, on His Method ? I think not. For that blessed 
and Divine Reformer Who sees into all consciences, and 
knows every condition, when He found thieves and mer- 
cenaries in His Father's House, did not go and build 
another house, with bolts which thieves might burst, with 
bars through which they would find easy way ; but He 
turned the thieves out of that House. So I believe that 
it is by the Church which He Himself began, and which 
He will cleanse of its apostasies, and not by any of the 
substitutes for Her — with all their apt, but violable, pro- 
visions against hypocrisy, superstition, heresy, false doc- 
trine — that He will leaven the World. For all such pro- 
visions, fit and wise as they seem for a certain time, for a 
special country, for a peculiar class of men, bear on 
them the stamp of the provider. They are Augustinian, 
Benedictine, Franciscan, Lutheran, Ignatian, Foxite, 
Wesleyan. They bear no mark of an Eternal and Catho- 



CHAP. II.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 81 

lie fitness. How, indeed, can an Eternal mark between 
the Church and the World be set by any except One to 
Whom the Past and the Future are equally and for ever 
Present? How can a Universal mark be set by any 
except One to Whom every conscience in the Universe is 
always lying open for judgment ? 

xii. The nearest approach we can make to an insight 
so Eternal, so Catholic, is by History. Yet, what a 
weak, insufficient, fallible insight that must be ! Each 
generation tells the preceding one that it misunderstood 
the scope and meaning of half its records. Nearly every 
fresh writer, of any power, overturns some historical con- 
clusion which ages have accepted ; and those characters 
of men which we believed set for ever, are reversed in the 
most unexpected way. But how frightfully hopeless it 
must be to attempt to fix, de novo, the laws and manners 
of a Universal Society, without perfect knowledge of all 
the History which we can know ! This one thing History 
does teach us, — that the particular cannot be a law to the 
Universal, the species to the Genus, the part to the 
Whole, the member to the Body, Fox to Mankind. And 
in so far as the Quaker constitution is Foxite, or Bar- 
clayite, or characteristically stamped by any fallible man 
or men, it has an inescapeable element of decay in its very 
being ; it must die. It is only a question of time, and 
of corrective conditions, how long the principle of decay 
will be in working out its final decease. 



82 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IL 



CHAPTER III. 

THE SECULAR CONTRIBUTION. 

i. Introductory — Partial or Secular Character of all Schisms 
— Self-destructive Exaggeration of the point they sepa- 
rate upon, 
ii. Schisms as against the Age, and as created by the Age — 

Quakerism. anti-Puritan and hyper-Puritan, 
iii. Quakerism the Sect of the Seventeenth Century. The 
" godly, thorough Reformation" — All Sects failed to 
realize it. 
iv. Quakerism became the Sect of the Time, by protesting 
against the Puritan Theology as unable to realize the 
" godly, thorough Reformation.' ' 
v. Quakerism became the Sect of the Age by asserting its 

own Theology as the method, 
vi. And by adopting the Secular (that is, the Puritan) theory 

of Life, Worship, &c, as in itself, the Reformation, 
vii. Secularity of Schisms a Seed of sure Decay — Quakerism 

as a Product of the Seventeenth Seculum. 
viii. The Scriptural meaning of an Age — Opposition of the 
Age, with all its Products, to the Eternal Order, or 
Church. 
ix. Evil Elements of the Seventeenth Century built up into 

Quakerism. 
x. One Seculum cannot legislate for all — Eternity the Law 
for all Ages, and not one Age for all. 

i. In this chapter I intend to notice the element con- 



GHAP. IIL] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 83 

tributed to the original constitution of Quakerism by the 
Age or Seculum in which it arose. 

It is the invariable nature of Schisms to bear upon 
them the characteristics of a Time. It is manifested both 
in what they exaggerate and in what they lack. For, 
supposing an enduring or non-secular Body to be com- 
pounded, say, of twenty necessary conditions, every one 
of which requires to be duly manifested, and bringing 
forth life, a Schismatic body ensues, where one, or two, or 
many, of these conditions are left unmanifested, are fruit- 
less ; so that the really enduring body appears dead. 
This one, or two, or many, will be the central and gov- 
erning conditions of the schismatic body, will hold an 
exaggerated importance in it ; while the nineteen, or re- 
maining conditions will hold unduly subordinate places in 
it ; their life will become cramped, their use die out. A 
Schism succeeds by opposing the recognized evils of the 
Seculum, by pointing out the unrecognized, and by satis- 
fying its felt and fancied needs. 

ii. So a Schism arising in any particular age, and 
having great success in that age, would be at once more 
in conflict with the Seculum, and yet more in harmony 
with it than any co-existing body. Thus, Quakerism 
seems more strenuously opposed than any other Schism 
of that most schismatic of all ages, to the very spirit of 
the seventeenth century, its own age ; and yet to be ex- 
pressing that spirit as no other among its Schisms could 
do. Every one will acknowledge that the prominent 
characteristic of England in the middle of the seventeenth 
century was Puritanism. Yet Quakerism was, in the first 



84 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

principles of its Theology and Anthropology, the most 
essentially unpuritan of all bodies. But in its cultus, 
form, and modes, it was more Puritan than Puritanism 
itself. 

iii. Quakerism was not only an expression of the temper 
of the Seventeenth Seculum, it was the Sect of the times. 
The real aim of that Seculum was, as its profound satirist 
has represented it in his Hudibras, a a godly, thorough 
Reformation." Even Archbishop Laud, whom all the 
Herods and Pilates of the time agreed in denouncing as 
the most formidable enemy of the Age's movement, was 
actually martyred for attempting to carry out what he be- 
lieved to be a "godly, thorough Reformation." But with 
such a Reformation the Seculum was not satisfied. It did 
not answer to that informal, confused, phantasmal Refor- 
mation in the hot brains of the religionists of the day. 
Presbyterianism tried to satisfy it, but failed. The Inde- 
pendents and Anabaptists tried, but failed. The Seekers, 
Ranters, and other Sects, made little and local experi- 
ments, but failed. Each new Sect said to the newest ex- 
cept itself, ' You are not going far enough.' While that 
in its turn answered, ' You are going too far S* 

* Thus Richard Baxter, from his Presbyterian point of view, 
says, " To the Separatists and Anabaptists in England: You do 
but prepare too many for a further progress ; Seekers, Rant- 
ers, Familists, and too many professed Infidels, do spring up 
from among you, as if this were your journey's end and the 
perfection of your revolt. You may see that you cannot hold 
your followers when you have them. Your work is blasted; 
you labor in vain. You do but prepare men for flat heresy 
and apostasy. I have heard yet from the several parts of the 



CHAP. III. THE QUAKER SCHISM. 85 

But the moment Quakerism appeared as a definite in- 
stitution and set of credenda (Tor it did come to the great 
mass as a system of credenda), and as the Church into 
which men must enter, it succeeded. Leslie says that 
George Fox had at one time one hundred thousand dis- 
ciples, so rapidly his movement spread. The Seekers 
found that it was what they were seeking. The great 
Puritan Sects lost all their most consistently Puritan 
members ; for they perceived that the honest and logical 
working out of the Puritan theories was exhibited in Quak- 
erism. They were already there in heart ; they merely 
went forward and took that advanced ground of which 
they had all along had glimpses and surmises. Quaker- 
ism spoke out what the Seculum was half fancying — was 
indefinitely expectiug. It gathered up, completed, and 
proclaimed forth, in a wonderful manner, all the serious 
thoughts, the fears, the suspicions, and the ill-digested 
theories, which had long been visiting the men of that 
time. 

iv. First, Quakerism became the Sect of the Age by 
making a protest against the Puritan Theology and 
Churches as unable to carry on the u godly, thorough Re-. 
formation," that illusion of the Seculum. They opposed 
Puritanism so far as it seemed to be hindering that Re- 
formation. It seemed to them to be hindering it, chiefly, 
by its hard, dogmatic, exclusive view of God's temper to- 

land, but of very few that have drunk in this venom of the 
Ranters or Quakers, but such as have first been of your opin- 
ions, and gone out at that door." — Second Preface to The 
Quaker's Catechism [4to., London, 1665.] 



86 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

ward men, and by its still clinging to a belief in the possi- 
bility of a National or Parliamentary Church. To such 
theories, as I have said in an earlier place, Quakerism op- 
posed the Doctrines of the Universal Inward Light and 
Grace, and the Doctrine of the Spiritual Church. So far, 
it set itself in contradiction to Puritanism. But in the 
matters of the ministry, worship, and discipline, it con- 
demned Puritanism by surpassing it. * You are right,' 
the Quaker would have said to the Puritan, ' in all that 
you have urged against that daughter of Babylon, the late 
Church of the Prelates ; but you do not go far enough. 
You do not perceive the issue of the principles you your- 
selves have started. It is because you do not believe in 
the Light, because you resist His lessons, that you stop 
half-way in the work of the Lord. Your assertion of the 
need of a Divine call to the ministry, you invalidate by 
still receiving Oxford and Cambridge students. Your 
assertion of the unity and spirituality of the Church, you 
invalidate by talking of a Church of England — by meet- 
ing in stone steeple-houses and calling them churches ; and 
so through every point of witness given you to uphold. 
You will not return to the Master His talent with inter- 
est.'* 

* George Fox says, in his Epistle to Gathered Churches into 
Outward Forms, "Ye have run on without a King, without 
Christ the Light of the World, which hath enlightened every 
one that is come into the world. But now is truth risen, now 
are your fruits withering." — Journal, p. 161, [fol ed. 1694.] 

William Dewsbury, in his Discovery of the Great Enmity of the 
Serpent against the Seed of the Woman [4to., London, 1655], is 



CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 87 

v. Secondly, Quakerism became the Sect of the Age, 
by asserting its own Theology and Church as the only effi- 
cient Method of the " godly, thorough Reformation," that 
dream of the Age. The Quakers discerned the inmost 
spirit and purpose of that Seculum. It, the world then 
passing away and the glory of it, was a peculiarly " reli- 
gious world." The Puritans were the men of the time. 
They had cast down the Church as unholy, they had driven 
her Priests to garrets and prisons, and they had set up, as 
they fancied, a real Kingdom of Christ upon her ruins. 
But the world felt that Puritanism had not brought in the 
righteousness, unity, and joy in the Holy Ghost which it was 
blindly groping after ; and religious men saw that the fine 

very bitter on the glee and self-confidence of the Puritans on 
their " Reformation.' ' " England, who, according to her own 
lusts, hath heaped teachers to herself, that hath spoken 
smooth things to her, calling her the beautiful Church and 
Spouse of Chrisx." 

Also, A Return to the Priests about Beverly for their Advisement, 
[4to., London, 1653.] " The English Church held up by you 
the English Teachers who gave forth this book ; who are made 
by the will of man ; those who are come to The Church o/Gtod, 
by you called Quakers, deny such." This book, or " advise- 
ment, " by the Presbyterian and other teachers, is thus 
named: "A Faithful Discovery of a Treacherous Design of Mysti- 
cal Antichrist, displaying Christ's Banners, but attempting to lay 
waste Scriptures, Churches, Christ, Faith, Hope, frc, and to estab- 
lish Paganism in England." [4to, London, 1653, pp. 60.] This 
tract is very moderate, and admits that many of the evils 
witnessed against really exist. The Quaker's Return is very 
violent. 



88 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

new Army and Parliament Churches were not manifesting 
forth the life of Jesus. A spirit of dissent against Pres- 
byterian and Independent Puritanism arose from end to 
end of England. Sects sprung up like mushrooms in a 
night ; all differing from each other in idea and method, 
but all agreeing in end, for one and all set before them as 
the real Wxoj of the Age, the enthusiastic delusion of a 
" godly, thorough Reformation. Some expected it through 
General Assemblies, some through a New Discipline, some 
by imprisonments and persecutions, some by the sudden 
appearance of Christ to Judgment. Quakerism arose 
amid all these. It agreed with them in aiming at the 
same Wxo* ; but it differed with by making this glorious 
assertion : \ Christ has come, He is knocking now at 
every conscience in Christendom, asking to be let in. The 
Lord has come Himself to teach His people.' They dif- 
fered in scorning and rejecting all the methods labored 
for and dreamt of by the other Sects. The coming Dis- 
cipline, the Parliamentary Statutes, Imprisonments, the 
Appearance of Christ in the Flesh, they thought all 
needless methods. He had come in the Spirit and Will, 
in the centre of man's being, in the only part of the crea- 
tion where the working out of a really ' godly, thorough 
Reformation' was possible."* 

* See, inter alia, the experience of the different Quaker 
Apostles, as sketched in Sewell's History; John Whitehead's 
Autobiography, entitled, The Enmitie between the Two Seeds [Lon- 
don, 4to., 1655] ; William Dewsbury's Autobiography, affixed, 
tinder the title " The First Birth," to his Discovery of the En- 
mity [4to., 1655] ; John Perrot's in the Epistle to the Reader, 



CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 89 

vi. Thirdly, Quakerism became the Sect of the Age by 
putting forward the loose, unchurchly, Secular theories 
concerning worship, the ministry, prohibitions, and out- 
ward distinctions between the Church and the world, as 
in themselves the " godly, thorough Reformation." They 
exaggerated Puritanism. For not only the world, but 
Puritans themselves, felt that Puritanism had not brought 
in that glorious Spiritual Kingdom, to the easy advent of 
which the orders and rites of the Catholic Church had 
seemed to them the only hindrance. They pushed their 
theology through various Church forms, one after the 
other : from Presbyterianism into Independency, and from 
Independency to Anabaptism. But they gained no 
greater purity, no wider success. An immense body lay 
predisposed to accept any institution which should offer a 
surer path to the Puritan Waoj. Quakerism was pecu- 
liarly fitted to make such a promise. It met both those 
classes of Puritans who felt sure that there was a wrong 
element somewhere or other in their own Ism: it met 
that class who believed that the disorder lay in its theol- 
ogy, by calling them off from the exercises and sermons 
"made out of the saints' conditions and heathen authors," 
to the Divine Word in the heart : it met that class who 
believed that Puritanism had not reached its ?e%o$ because 
it stood still, by exaggerating, or rather, by developing 

his before Mystery of Baptism and the Lord's Supper [London, 4to., 
1662] ; Francis Howgill, in the Glory of the True Church Dis- 
covered, as it was in its Purity in the Primitive Time [8vo., 1660, 
p. 160] : chapter iv. pp. 29-31, he proves that Quakerism is 
the only way out of the Apostasy into the Reformation. 



90 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

to the utmost, all those Secular theories of Puritanism 
which arose from its own confusion of itself with the 
Church, and of all unpuritan men and sects with the 
World. The Quaker prohibitions of music, of mourning- 
habits and gravestones, and almost every other item of 
the Book of Discipline, arose from the Puritan spirit of 
the Seventeenth Seculum contributing to Quakerism ; 
they had all been contended for by some prior Schism of 
the Time.* 

vii. This Secularity of Schisms is a cause of their in- 
evitable decay. The only constitution which cannot decay 
must be an Eternal one — that is, it must be as fitted for 
to-day as it was for yesterday ; for to-morrow as either ; 
— for the nineteenth century as for the seventeenth ; for 
the twentieth as for either. Now the cause of a Sect 
breaking off from the Universal Body, must be either from 
self-will, or from some supposed or real inefficiency in the 
Universal Body at the time of such breaking off. But 
let us accept the most charitable hypothesis ; let us say 
that it breaks off to seek a righteousness which it is not 
finding in the Universal Body. It seeks, itself, to become 

* That Quakerism was not only a development, but the fulfil- 
merit, of Puritanism, is implied in such passages as the follow- 
ing from William Coddington's letter to Richard Bellingham, 
Governor of Massachusetts : — " Consider that forty-five years 
past thou didst own such a suffering people that now thou 
dost persecute. They were against hishops, and ceremonies, 
and conformable priests. They were the Seed of God, that did 
serve Him in spirit: then called Puritans, now called Quakers." 
— W. C's Demonstration of True Love unto the Rulers of the Colony 
of Massachusetts, pp. 19, 20 [4to, 1674J. 



CHAP. III.] THE QUAKEB SCHISM. 91 

a universal body, and to build a final and enduring home 
for righteousness. All sects have this vision of hope ; 
they would be lunacies or follies if they had not. But a 
constitution built by men of a special Age or Seculum, 
must be built with the tools which that Seculum supplies. 
Laws given forth, theories evolved, bases laid, customs 
prescribed, in certain periods, must be spoken, evolved, 
laid down, in such words and modes as are current among 
the men of those periods. The founders cannot leap over 
two centuries, and take the instruments, the language, 
and the methods of an unborn time, to build their institu- 
tion, lay down their laws, prescribe their customs. If 
the fathers of Quakerism had done so, the Quaker consti- 
tution and customs would have certainly suited what is 
called the " spirit of the nineteenth century," though it 
would not so certainly have suited the spirit of the twen- 
tieth century. But then it would not have suited the 
seventeenth century, the time for which it was really 
wanted. They might have cast it down among their own 
contemporaries; but none would have seen in it any in- 
terpretation of their Age's questions — none would have 
run into it as the long-expected resting-place for their 
worn and homeless spirits : none would have seen any 
fitness or desirableness in it. The founders would have 
had a glorious prophetic vision ; they would not have 
done any thing for the help and benefit of men. 

viii. A further light is thrown on the decay of a spe- 
cific religious society, marked with the characteristics of 
a specific age, when we think of the Scriptural purport 
of the term Age. The Bible speaks of the Age or Seat- 



92 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK II. 

lum — of the spirit of the Age, as evil, or, at least, as not 
good. It is the "World that passeth away. 11 It is the 
"present evil World." It is the whole circle of business, 
amusement, knowledge, government, religion, considered 
as uninformed by the Divine Presence. It is the aggregate 
of human influences considered as only human. It is the 
World as left to itself. It is that self-willed spirit of false 
and hasty judgment which condemns and sneers at all th.e 
Past, because it was unlike itself; and which, notwith- 
standing, sets up itself as the law and rule for all times to 
come. It is the spirit which resists the Ecclesia, or King- 
dom of God, or Eternal Constitution, arising out of no 
Age or Seculum — bound by no condition of past, present, 
or future, but ready for all Ages — the Seeula Seculorum. 
Out of this distinction rises the everlasting strife between 
the pure ecclesiastical and pure secular : corruptions in 
the Church, the necessity and rise of sects, spring from 
confounding them. 

ix. The Age, or Seculum, as distinct from the Ecclesia 
with which it co-exists, contains in itself elements either 
evil or not good. If a schism be organized into a formal 
constitution by a contribution from the the Holy Spirit, 
from the personal founder, and from the Age or Seculum, 
the secular element must be chosen out of these evil or 
not good characteristics. It is not likely that men be- 
lieving themselves directed by the Holy Spirit, and 
seeking to do a Holy Will, would select the evil. They 
would choose the not good; that is, the public opinion, 
the illusions and errors, the excited mental epidemics and 
enthusiasms of the Age ; they would build up these into 



CHAP. III.] THE QUAKER SCHISM. 93 

their system. And these are the very elements which the 
builders of Quakerism chose out of the Seventeenth 
Seculum ; or, rather, which the spirit of the Seventeenth 
Seculum forced upon them. These elements are visible 
in Quakerism at this day ; like old rusted armor which 
living men can neither wear, nor know how to use ; which, 
if they could wear it, and did use it, would not be the 
least defence against existing enemies, but rather a help 
to the wearer's own destruction. And the worst of it is, 
instead of being, like such old armor, a thing for anti- 
quarians to admire and talk over, Quakers are expected, 
by Quakerism, to wear and use this strange gear of the 
days of their fathers. 

x. One century can no more legislate for eternity — can 
no more set up its temporal secular idiosyncrasies for a 
law to all centuries — than one individual can do so for the 
race. A universal religion and church must be eternal as 
to times, as well as catholic as to places and persons. It 
must not only not be Roman, Greek, English, Genevan ; 
it must not only not be Montanist, Phocian, Wesleyan, 
Poxite, Laudian ; it must neither be of the Patristic, 
Mediaeval, or Reforming Ages. It must be fitted to what 
is enduring in men, to that which is the same in all ages : 
that is, to the human spirit pressed down by sin, thirsting 
for deliverance from it. Por Religion and the Church 
exist to take hold of the eternal part of man — of that 
which knows no change, — the redeemed Seed, the com- 
munication of the Immutable God in him. 



BOOK III. 

THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 
CHAPTER I. 

i. Preservation of Quakerism by Discipline, 
ii. A Discipline not expected by the first Quakers, 
iii. Christ Jesus the Discipliner of Christians. 
iv. Testimony of Quaker Documents. 
v. Schisms at the Establishment of a Discipline, 
vi. The Establishment of a Quaker Discipline a Cession of 

Quaker assumptions, 
vii. A Glance at the Preservative Influence of the Discipline, 
viii. This Influence inherent, not merely associative. 

i. Is the discipline of Quakerism connected in any 
casual manner with Quaker decay? Before saying yes or 
no to this question, I must assert my conviction that the 
Discipline of Quakerism has been connected in a casual 
manner with the life of Quakerism. But I must say, at 
the same time, that this connection between Discipline 
and Life is traceable only in the way of preservation, 
and not in the way of growth; as a conservative element, 
and not as an aggressive and assimilative one. Yet the 
only true and enduring preservation is preservation by 
(94) 



CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 95 

means of growth,- that is, by a real informing principle of 
life. Growth is a function or faculty of real preservation 
Preservation by Discipline alone is but a temporary arrest 
of decay. 

ii. I think there can be little doubt that the idea of a 
Discipline in their Society at all, the conviction of their 
need of a Discipline, took the first Quakers by surprise. 
For if, as I have already hinted in this Essay, the idea, 
the conviction at the bottom of the Quaker constitution 
was the essentially schismatical one, that it was to be the 
Peculium of God, the holy and utterly sinless Seed, the 
body of perfected ones, the true Catholic Church, those •* 
xaOapoi, which Novatians, Donatists, and every successive 
Sect had hoped themselves to be ; then it was evident that 
the very suggestion of a Discipline for the Quaker body, was 
a kind of unconscious confession that they too, like their 
predecessors in the pathway of Schism, were journeying 
to a delusion — that they could not be the Peculium, for 
unrighteousness and disorder had found a way into their 
society. 

iii. If George Pox and his fellows, in the first flush of 
their success, when calling upon all men to "come out of 
the Apostasy," and from "man-made Sects" to the Church 
of the Living God, had been asked how they should ar- 
range, supposing sin was to appear in the holy Church 
(i. e. in Quakerism), or supposing Christians (i.e. Quak- 
ers) required to marry, to educate children, to bury friends 
— they would have put aside the questioner as one " out 
of the Light," and the question as a M speech of dark- 
ness." 'The Light Himself, Christ within us, is our 



96 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

Discipliner,' they would have said. 'We have no need 
of Canons, rules, written laws. He will show His Church 
what to do, and what to avoid, every moment. ' This, 
certainly, was their belief ; it took, however, a distorted 
form, and later gave rise to the hyper-Quaker Schism 
which called forth Barclay's Anarchy of the Banters, and 
Penn's Liberty Spiritual. And what are all Canons, and 
rules of Discipline, but a cage against whose bars the 
spirit wounds her breast, and breaks her wings, except 
she has the sense of a Divine and loving Discipliner, Who 
is also a Giver of true liberty ? Thus that great Father 
of the Church, S. Clement of Alexandria, gives to his 
whole book of advices and rules upon eating, drinking, 
marriages, children, laughter, evil-speaking, gems, oint- 
ments, perfumes, and so on, the name of The Discipliner 
(ncuSaycoyos). And that Discipliner is Jesus Christ our 
Lord, " Light of Light."* 

iv. Here I will quote what Quakerism itself declares 
of its Discipline, and declares, too, in its official charac- 
ter. " It cannot be said that any System of Discipline 
formed a part of the original compact of the Society. 
There was not, indeed, to human appearance, any thing 
systematic in its formation ; it was an association of per- 

* So, too, S. Augustine: — " Disciplina a discendo dicta est: 
Discipline Domus est Ecclesia Chkisti. Quid ergo hie disci- 
tur, vel quare discitur ? Qui sunt qui discunt, et a Quo discunt ? 
Discitur bene vivere. Propter hoc discitur bene vivere, ut 
perveniatur ad semper vivere. Discunt Christiani, docet 
Christus." — De Disciplind Christiand: Omn, Opera S. August. 
[Ed. Caillau, torn, xxvii. p. 109.] 



CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 97 

sons who were earnestly seeking, yea, panting after, the 
saving knowledge of Divine Truth."* 

v. Thus, not only by deduction from Quaker principle, 
but also by the official confession of the Society, we see 
that the Quaker Discipline was an uncontemplated thing. 
The violent objection with which the Discipline was as- 
sailed by some of the more primitive Quakers, and the 
fact that Barclay and Penn were the defenders of it, show 
this still more plainly. f " It proved a great trial of 
spirits. The self-willed and lawless opposed it with vehe- 
mence, and it must be admitted that not a few of a very 
different class were drawn aside by specious arguments to 
oppose what was represented as an encroachment upon 
individual spiritual liberty."}. But the times of decay 
had already set in when William Penn became an autho- 
rity among Quakers. § For he (like the Friends of our 

* Introduction to the Rules of Discipline, p. 16. [London, 
4to., 1834-49.] 

f " This spirit cries, We must not judge conscience, we 
must not jndge matters of faith, and we mnst not judge 
spirits, nor religions." George Fox, singularly enough, ap- 
peals to the Bible to refute Perrot, Pennyman, and the rest : 
— "All you that deny prescriptions without distinction, may as 
well deny all the Scriptures, which are given forth by the 
power and Spirit of God. For do not they prescribe how men 
should walk both towards God and man, both in the Old Tes- 
tament and in the New?" — Journal, 1678. 

t Tract Association of the Society of Friends. Tract 124, 
p. 23. London, 1855. 

§ Doubtless, the extraordinary show of Polish, French, Lu- 
theran, Patristic, and Apologetic learning exhibited by George 
Fox at this date (as in his letter to King John III. of Poland) 

n 



98 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

own age) looked upon Quakerism more as an example of 
what the Church should be, than as the actual and only 
Peculium of God. The establishment of a Discipline 
was, in itself, (apart from the wisdom or folly of its laws, 
time after time), an unconscious prophecy of decay. For 
the aggressive growth of Quakerism continued only so 
long as Quakerism proclaimed itself the restored Church 
of God ; but its Discipline regards it as a private re- 
ligious family. 

vi. The establishment of a Discipline, also (by showing 
that sin appeared in the Quaker body), became a silent 
confession that the presence of sin in the existing Church 
and Sects did not (as pure Quakerism certainly had be- 
lieved and preached), necessarily, unchurch these bodies. 
As long as it was assumed by the Quakers that they were 
the Peculium, the True Church, every one who heard of 
the assumption was concerned also to know its truth. It 
was a great matter, not merely whether men were Chris- 
tians or not, but also whether they joined " the Seed of 
God, called Quakers," or not. The ignorant already in 
that Seed, would preach and labor the harder, cleave all 
the more closely to it, for the monstrous assumption. 
The ignorant without the Society, would be the more 
sternly arrested to hearken to the Quaker preachers, as 
they are now to listen to the Mormonites. Thus the 
assumption both gave vigor to the inward life of the 
Society, and also furthered its outward growth. But 
when Quakers gave up this assumption, the whole relation 

was lent him by Penn, Keith, or Barclay, all of whom travelled 
with him on the Continent. — Journal, 1678. 



CHAP. I.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 99 

of things was changed. It was the cutting of Samson's 
locks. The religion at which all sects and opinions trem- 
bled, became the most harmless and powerless of all. If 
Quakerism be but a denomination — a part of the Church 
— and if other sects be other parts, then every man is free 
to choose the part which pleases or suits him the most. 
The Quaker may prefer some other body ; or he may 
prefer the body in which his habits were formed, to which 
his associations are bound. But still he can give up 
Quakerism without being an apostate. The gap yawn- 
ing at one time between Quakerism and other isms is 
filled up. Quakerism has ceased to be, has ceased to 
pretend to be, obligatory on the conscience. 

vii. Yes, a young man or young woman trained up 
under the Quaker Discipline may, indeed, without sin, 
give up Quakerism. But here comes in the real preserva- 
tive power of that Discipline. The character of his, of 
her, life has been formed by it. By it he and she have 
learned to look at the world, and home, and faith, and 
duty, and Christ. By it they have learned some inter- 
pretation of the mystery and difficulty of living. By it 
they have learned to avoid the things they are avoiding, 
and to permit the things they are permitting. It has 
been, and is, the Canon of their life, that by which they 
have ruled the right or wrong of every thing. They are, 
in greater or less measure, the creatures of it, and it is 
difficult for them, and not merely undesirable, to escape 
their creator's grasp. 

viii. And this preservative power must be put down to 
the Discipline itself, as something over and above that 



100 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

ordinary power of association, which, as it carries the 
sons and daughters of Churchmen to the Parish Church, 
the children of Independents and Anabaptists to the 
Chapel, or the children of Methodists to the Preaching- 
house, would take the children of Quakers to Meeting. 
The Discipline has given to Quakers, the weakest of all 
Sects in power of external conviction and growth, a 
source of internal strength which every other Sect, which 
the Church herself, might covet. Every member the 
Church keeps, she keeps in spite of her lack of a Disci- 
pline ; or, rather, in spite of the abeyance of her Disci- 
pline. And now that, in the mercy of her King, she is 
reawakening to a fresh sense of her tremendous mission, 
and is looking into her armory, and counting whether she 
shall be able with her thousands of thousands to meet 
those who come against her with their tens of thousands, 
the first need she perceives is her want of a Discipline. 
For this she expresses, in her great annual mourning on 
Ash Wednesday, her fervent longing and hope.* 

* Commination Office. 



CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 101 



CHAPTER II. 

i. Idea of a Peculiura necessary to a Discipline. 
ii. The Whole Work of a Discipline — The Branches of a Dis- 
cipline. 
iii. To keep the World and the Church asunder, 
iv. What is the World ?— With Early Quakerism ? —With 

Modern ? 
v. The Two Worlds of Holy Scripture — The Human World 

—The Carnal, 
vi. Schisms confound these Two Worlds. 
vii. The Human World is Redeemed. 

viii. The Carnal World is Reprobated — Distinctions of Saint 
Augustine. 

i. I have said fhat in the establishment of a Disci- 
pline, the Quaker Church implicitly ceded its assumption 
of being the Peculium. 

Albeit, without the idea of a Peculium — that is, of a 
holy, invisible, and eternal Society, as distinct from the 
unholy, visible, and passing-away Society of the World — 
a Church Discipline would not only lose sight of its end, 
but also want strength and will to move toward any high 
end at all. For the end of Discipline is perfection; 
TtatSoycoyc'a aims at making every one whom it disciplines 
a ti-KELos : and at nothing less. The end of Discipline is 



102 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

the realization in the actual and visible Church, or in any 
part of it, of the absolute purity and goodness of the 
ideal " Church of the Firstborn" in Heaven — the Society 
of the Holy Trinity, of the Angels, of the Patriarchs, 
Prophets, Apostles, Martyrs, Confessors, and the whole 
company of the Blessed Dead, who, though dead, yet 
live. And this purity and goodness of the Ideal Church 
is unrealized, is made impossible, in the actual Church, 
or in any part of it, by the discovery of worldly elements 
in it. Thus, while the positive work of a Church Disci- 
pline is the edification of the Church members in a really 
churchly or renewed life, its negative work is the keeping 
out of all worldly elements. 

ii. Or, to speak broadly, the whole work of a Disci- 
pline is — to preserve alive the eternal distinctions between 
the Church and the World ; the reprobated body and the 
elect body ; the body inspired by the indwelling Spirit 
and the body left to itself. This is done ; First, by pre- 
venting worldly persons and worldly elements from enter- 
ing into the Redeemed body ; as sucn Discipline is pro- 
hibitional, and consists in the prohibition of, or restric- 
tion from, certain wicked and worldly acts or things, that 
men may not unchurch themselves from that fellowship 
with God which is true Church fellowship, and so lay 
open to excommunication by the Church, or body that 
represents the Church. Secondly, by casting forth such 
elements wheresoever they have entered ; as such, Disci- 
pline is penitential, and calls for that change and forsak- 
ing of mind, that compunction and confession, by which 
men are reunited to, or realize their union with, God and 



CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 103 

all the Holy Society in Heaven and on earth ; and on 
which they are received again into the visible communion 
of the body which represents to them the Church on 
earth, the body being here — Quakerism. Thirdly, by 
taking charge of all those matters necessary to the Re- 
deemed Body as a collection of human beings ; such as 
birth, death, holy matrimony, education, the poverty of 
members ; or matters necessary to the Redeemed Body as 
consisting of Spirits in the flesh, Spirits reached through 
the senses, as ministry, meetings, buildings for worship : 
as such, Discipline is institutional. 

iii. Such are the general branches into which a Disci- 
pline must be divided, if its purpose be to keep asunder 
the Church (or body supposing itself to be the Church) 
and the World. What elements, what persons, will this 
Discipline prohibit ? Worldly elements, worldly persons. 
Who are the subjects of its penitential canons ? Worldly 
persons, or at least those who have become, for the time, 
or in the act to be repented of, unchurchly (or, in Quaker 
phrase, unfriendly.) 

Thus, the whole character and tone of the Discipline 
of any religious society calling itself the Church, depends 
immensely upon its interpretation of the term World, 
upon what the members abjure when they forsake the 
World. 

iv. Ancient Quakers, I think, would have said that 
they meant, by the World, all persons who were resisting 
the entry of Christ's Light into their darkness ; all who 
were loving their own darkness above His Light ; all ele- 
ments which were contrary to His Nature and Will ; im- 



104 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

plicitly, all unquakerly elements. Modern Quakers would 
say, I think, that they understand by the World, what the 
Holy Scripture understands by it. 

v. The Bible speaks of two Worlds. Our Lord says, 
in the Gospel of S. John,* that there is a World which 
God the Father so loved that He gave His only begotten 
Son for it ; which the Son so loves that he is always seek- 
ing to draw it nearer and nearer to Himself, by His 
Spirit and Light, — to transmute it into His own Body, 
the Church. The Church — therefore, or whatsoever so- 
ciety may think itself the Church — must surely be bound 
to love this World, which her Father loves, which her 
Husband the Lord Jesus loves. S. John says there is 
a World which God calls upon us not to love. All that 
is in it is contrary to Himself, to His Divine Righteous- 
ness, to His Fatherly Nature, to the Spirit and Light of 
His Son ; it has no care for, no unity with, anything but 
itself; it is already under the condemnation of God. 
That World which the Church is to love and this World 
which the Church is not to love, cannot be one and the 
same World ; they must be two contradictory Worlds. 

vi. Is there not a danger, then, that a new Schism — 
which separates itself from the existing Church, for the 
very reason that its members may be more strictly dis- 
tinguished from the World than they have ever yet been 
— may make some confusion between these two Worlds, 
and take the one for the other ? Is it not possible that 
they may separate themselves from that World which the 
Husband of the Church yearns over, which has in it a 
* S. John, iii. 16. 



CHAP. II.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 105 

measure of His Light and of His Spirit? Is it not pos- 
sible they may unite themselves, in some way, still more 
closely, with that very World from which the Church is 
called to be separate, against whose selfish divisions and 
self-witnessings she is set up to bear eternal witness for 
God? 

I believe that it is not only possible, or even likely — I 
believe it is absolutely certain — that this will occur. The 
history of every Schism, from Cerinthus to John Wesley's 
Societies, seems to me to prove it. Deluding themselves 
that they are in the Church, or least the truest representa- 
tives of the Church, they account all persons and opinions 
contrary to them as the not- Church — in other words, as 
the World : thus they come to love things which God is 
hating, and to condemn things which He is justifying. 

And what are these two Worlds of which the Holy 
Scriptures speak ? Their difference may be set, I think, 
by two simple adjectives : one is Human, the other is 
Carnal. 

vii. The Human World, that is, the whole Race of 
Adam's posterity, and all they do and are by God's original 
fiat, wisdom, and ordering, as the Artist of Mankind, can- 
not be dead or lost in His sight. For He sees Mankind 
—not as He made them, nor as they wickedly have un- 
made and do unmake themselves — but as the Body to 
which His Son has united Himself, their everlasting Head. 
In Him we live : as in Adam we all died, even so in 
Christ we are all made alive. God looks upon Human- 
ity, and upon all human functions, in His Son. Whether 
we eat, or drink, or dress, or walk, or laugh, or sing, or 



106 THE PECULITJM. [BOOK III. 

think, or dance, or labor, we can do all these to the glory 
of God. These are things which every Christian man in 
some measure acknowledges, because Christ teaches him 
as a man, what He does not teach him as the member of 
a Sect. But these are things which his Sect in some mea- 
sure or other denies. For no Sect at all is founded on 
the nature of Man, which involves (I speak with awe), in 
the Incarnation, the Nature of God : no Sect at all ever 
separated from the Catholic Church in order to bear wit- 
ness to this (at the time of separation) forgotten truth, 
" was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin 
Mary, and was made man."* The Creeds are the vin- 
dication of Mankind's liberty from man-made, from sect- 
fancied Disciplines. The Disciplines of Sects have proved 
a tyranny over the consciences of men, or crushed down 
their divinely given faculties, their human intuitions, be- 
cause the Sects have held a crude, slippery, or doubting 
notion of the Incarnation. Though the Quaker Discipline 
here and there acknowledges, perhaps, with the early 
Quakers, the fact that Christ has baptized every member 
of our race with a measure of His convicting, saving, and 
condemning Light, — it never says, it never seems able to 
say, with S. Augustine, in the Confessions, " Thou hast 
inspired me through the Humanity of Thy SoN."f 

viii. The Carnal World is hateful in the eyes of God, 
because it is the corruption, the vitiation, of what He has 

* Nicene Creed. 

f "Inspirasti mihi per Humanitatem Filii Tui." — Lib. i. 
c. 1: Omnia Opera S. Augnstini. [Ed. Caillau, torn, xxv.] 



CHAP. II.] THE IDEA OF QUAKERISM. 107 

made. It is the whole round of rebellious spirits living 
as if they were not spirits ; the whole mass of evil ele- 
ments, influences, pursuits, from which every ray of 
Christ's Light, every effluence of His Life, is utterly ban- 
ished. It is lust, that is, the turning of the whole desire 
upon Self ; the putting of every Self in the place of God ; 
the setting up a loose self-will for His Law ; of a selfish 
understanding for His Infinite Reason and Wisdom ; and 
the estimation of Self as the real pivot and centre of the 
universe. 

This World, our Lord says, loves its own, and hates 
those whom He has chosen out of it.* "It is said to 
love itself," says S. Augustine, commenting on these 
words, " because it loves the wickedness by which it is 
wicked ; and again it is said to hate itself, because it 
loves the thing that hurts it. It hates, therefore, in itself 
Nature, it loves Vitiation ; it hates what is made by the 
goodness of God, it loves what in it is made by loose free- 
will."^ And again, he says, "It is the Vitiation in it we 
are forbidden to delight in, and are bidden to delight in 
the Nature ; whereas, in its own self it delights in the 

* S. John xv. 19. 

f " Diligere se dicitur, quoniam iniquitatem qua iniquus est 
diligit : et rursus odisse se dicitur, quoniam quod ei nocet, 
hoc diligit. Odit ergo in se Naturam, diligit Vitium: odit 
quod factus est per Dei bonitatem, diligit quod in eo factum 
est per liberam voluntatem." — Tractatus lxxxvii. In Joan. 
Evang. § iv. Omnia Opera S. Augustini. [Ed. Caillau, torn, xvi, 
p. 222.] 



108 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

Vitiation, and hates the Nature : so we can both delight 
in and hate it rightly, while it delights in and hates its 
own self perversely."* 

* " Vitium quippe in illo diligere prohibemur, j ubemurque 
diligere Naturam, cum ipse in se diligat Vitium, oderitque 
Natnram : ut nos enm et diligamus et oderimus recte cum se 
ipse diligat oderitque perverse." — Tractatus lxxxvii. In Joan, 
Evang. § iv. Omnia Opera S, Augustini. [Ed. Caillau, torn. xvi. 
p. 222.] 



CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 109 



CHAPTER III 

i. Question stated — To which World belong the Prohibitions 

of the Quaker Discipline ? 
ii. The Things prohibited. 

iii. Doers of these Things Members of the World, 
iv. The Things not inconvenient, but Sinful. 
v. Are they really sinful, Carnal ? 
vi. They are Unquakerly. 
vii. Evidences that they are really Human 
viii. Heathen Origin of the Theatre, Names of Months and Days, 
no reason against the use of them. 
ix. The Discipline of Quakerism fights against God by its 

Prohibitions — The Divine Disciplines 
x. The Discipline, as penitential, requires Quakers to repent 
of Right Acts. 

i. To which of these Worlds belong those " things of 
the World" which the Discipline of Quakerism endeavors 
to keep out of Quakerism by its prohibitions ? Are they 
the material and spiritual handiwork of God, parts of the 
creation which He blesses for the sake of His Son ? Or, 
are they the handiworks of our depraved free-wills, as 
separated from God? 

ii. The things prohibited will declare. The Discipline 
says, that a Quaker must not see Hamlet or Macbeth per- 
formed ; the people of the World go to plays. The Dis- 



110 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

cipline says, that a Quaker must not dance ; it is a diver- 
sion of the people of the World. "As becometh men 
professing godliness," says the Printed Epistle of 1848, 
(how differently the Quakers of two centuries ago would 
have designated themselves!) "we are led out of a con- 
formity to the varying fashions of the day, and restrained 
from the pursuits of Music and Dancing, from theatrical 
entertainments, and from vain sports, and from other frivo- 
lous and hurtful amusements of the World." Is the Church 
then, or is the Peculium in the Churches, a not dancing, 
not theatre-going, not music-hearing body? The Disci- 
pline says, that a Quaker must not kneel down to pray 
among persons of another Sect, nor among Churchmen. 
The Discipline says, that a Quaker must not marry out 
of the Quaker body. The Discipline says, that a Quaker 
must not wear black clothes as a sign of grief. The Dis- 
cipline says, that a Quaker must not mark the grave of 
his wife, parents, child, or friend, with a gravestone. The 
Discipline says, that a Quaker must not call the first day 
of the week, Sunday ; or the first month of the year, 
January. 

iii. Does not the prohibition of common prayer with 
other Christians, imply (as indeed the first Quakers 
preached and believed), that the members of the Sects 
and the Church are not Christians, but are in fact mem- 
bers of the World, from which, as the elect Church, the 
pillar and ground of the Truth, they, the Friends of Jesus, 
were called to separate themselves?* Does not the pro- 

* Compare, in this very matter of prohibitions, George 
Fox's language about non-Quaker Christians : "You may see 



CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. Ill 

hibition of marriage with non-Quakers imply the same ? 
The wearing of black clothes, also, in sign of grief; the 
putting up of memorials over our dear ones dead ; the 
ordinary naming of the days and months, are all implied, 
and sometimes asserted, by the Discipline of Quakerism, 
to be signs and notes of the World, of that passing- 
away body which is under the frown and condemnation 
of God. 

iv. It might perhaps be contended, that the Discipline 
regards these marks or notes as unfit, or inconvenient, 
rather than as sinful. The Discipline itself does not, I 
think, allow any such interpretation ; even if it did, the 
strong declarations of the primitive Quakers would con- 
vince us that the Spirit of Quakerism does not allow it. 
Thus, in regard to the prohibition of Music, the Printed 
Epistle of 1846 says, "Our attention has been turned to 
the increased exposure of our young Friends to the temp- 
tations of Music, which we believe to be, both in its ac- 
quisition and in its practice, unfavorable to the health 
of the soul." 

v. The question follows, Are these things prohibited 
really sinful ? In the first place, very few, if any, modern 
Quakers believe that they are. In 1764, the Society was 
11 hurt by hearing that [Quaker] booksellers have lent or 

a book written by the very Papists, and another by Richard 
Baxter, the Presbyterian, against bare breasts and bare backs. 
They, that were but in an outward profession, did declare against 
such things ; therefore they who are in the possession of truth 
and true Christianity should be ashamed of such things." — 
Journal, 1683. A Warning against Pride and Excess in Apparel, 



112 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

sold novels, romances, plays, or other pernicious books :" 
it entreated its members "to avoid a practice so incon- 
sistent with the purity of the Christian religion." Albeit, 
even if they are sinful, even though they are so prohib- 
ited, many Quakers indulge in them without any visitation 
from the Quaker Discipline. An educated Quaker, now- 
a-days, would be ashamed to have no opinion about 
Thackeray, Kingsley, or Dickens ; about In Memoriam, 
or The Idylls of the King. 

vi. But, granting that the things prohibited by the 
Quaker Discipline are prohibited as sinful, one cannot 
help seeing that they are prohibited as much, if not more, 
as unquakerly. Nor is this merely because of the old 
Quaker confounding of sin with non-Quakerism. The 
rules of most modern date assume Quakerism to be the 
xavdv of right and wrong. They are full «of appeals to 
the older Quakerism and Quakers. " Our ancient wit- 
ness," the "testimony of the elders," "our religious prin- 
ciples," "the views which it is our duty and our privilege 
to hold ;" these, and such expressions, appear in every 
section of the Rules of Discipline. The members of the 
Quaker Society are not forbidden by the Discipline to il- 
luminate their windows in times of public rejoicing, be- 
cause the Divine Discipliner of the Church restrains them 
inwardly by His Spirit from such an act ; but they are 
forbidden that "they may maintain inviolably" (as the 
Discipline says in H59, and reiterates in 1801, and again 
in 1833) "their ancient and Christian testimony in these 
respects."* Quakers are not prohibited by the Discipline 

* Rules of Discipline, p. 172, § 2. [4to. London, 1834-1849.] 



CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 113 

from "the observance of days set apart without a Divine 
direction" (that is, not through Quakers) because the 
Divine Discipliner convinces every such observer of the 
decrees of David, Constantine, S. Louis, or Elizabeth, of 
sin; but they are prohibited because it is " opposed" (as 
the Discipline says in 1833) "to those views of the spir- 
ituality of worship which it is our duty and privilege to 
hold."* 

vii. Some Friends, then, at least, indulge in some things 
prohibited by the Quaker Discipline, and so, implicitly, 
are excommunicated by the Quaker Society. But they 
do not feel any sting on their conscience ; they hear no 
whisper, no syllable of reproof, from the Disciplining 
Word. They are not even really shut out from Quaker 
communion. 

The truth is, their humanity condemns their Quakerism. 
These things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline are not 
only not carnal, not elements of the World as separated 
from God, not of lust and self-will ; they are human. 
Music, romances, the drama, dancing, outward signs of 
mourning, memorials to the beloved dead ; these all arise 
out of Man's original constitution, out of what S. Augus- 
tine calls our nature as made by God — natura opificium 
Dei ; and not out of our nature as corrupted by free-will ; — 
vitium liber w voluntatis. Wherever Man is, these things 
are. Men and women singularly obedient to the illumin- 
ation of Christ — men and women renewed in the whole 
spirit of their minds — have found occupation (not that 

* Rules of Discipline, p. 173, § 4. 



114 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

alone), have found even vocation, in the pursuits and 
things prohibited by Quakerism, — first as worldly, then as 
unquakerly. The first Friends often said that Moses, and 
David, and Jeremiah, and S. Paul, were Quakers. The 
three first were poets ; David was a musician ; S. Paul 
quotes Menander. S. Clement of Alexandria and S. Jus- 
tin Martyr quote heathen poets and playwriters ; therefore 
they must have been readers of them. And yet, of all the 
early Fathers, none exhibited in a more clear and vital 
method, or manifested in holier life, the principle of Fox, 
Hubberthorne, Parnell, Burroughs, and Howgill. A 
mighty host of redeemed artists, poets, romancists, musi- 
cians, play-writers, builders of monuments, bear witness 
for God and His order against the Discipline of Quaker- 
ism, which marks with the note of the World things which 
He, by the Incarnation of His Son, has marked with the 
seal of redemption, the sign of the Cross. 

viii. I add, as a type of the other prohibitions of the 
Discipline, the ground of its prohibition of the Theatre. 
Of course some Quakers condemn it on the loose and gen- 
eral principle that worldly people support the Theatre 
and therefore churchly, that is, quakerly people ought not 
to support it. Others condemn it for its accidents; for 
the bad people who may attend it, or the bad morals which 
may be spoken in it. But others (and this is also the 
ground of the Quaker prohibition against calling the first 
day Monday, and the first month January) contend that 
as it was not founded by Christian men in Christian times, 
but by Heathen men in Heathen times, as it was not a 
product of the Christian Mind, therefore it cannot be 



CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 115 

used by Christians. On the other hand, the Catholic 
Church says (as indeed, if she be Catholic, that is, univer- 
sally human, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, 
she cannot avoid saying), ■ The Theatre was a product of 
Heathen minds in Heathen ages. Heathens were men, 
made in the likeness of God, inspired in some measure, as 
S. Justin Martyr says, by Christ the Word, of Whom 
the whole human race are partakers.* Therefore I accept 
it, christen it, use it.' Shakspeare and Wycherley are not 
included in one condemnation ; a different measure is 
meted to Congreve and Lope de Vega. For the same 
reasons, also, we do not deny our Baptism, when we call 
the first day Monday, or the first month January. 

ix. The Discipline of Quakerism fights against God 
by its prohibitions. The whole of life is, as Bishop 
Butler has said, a Discipline. The Discipline of the 
Church ought to be a shadow and image of the Discipline 
of Her Divine Head, the Disciplining Word. All these 
things prohibited by the Quaker Discipline are parts of 
His Discipline. Until the Grace of God breaks in upon 
the conscience, by the Revelation of Jesus Christ, men 
are blind to their Divine Discipliner, even when they are 
receiving and profiting by His lessons and rules. But is 

* He contends that all who live according to the Divine 
Word (such as Socrates and Heraclitus amongst the Greeks, 
and Abraham, Ananias, Azarias, and Misael, among the Barba- 
rians), are in some sort Christians: while all who defy and 
disobey the Word are unchristian. — Apology, cap. Ixi. This 
is that grand and Catholic chapter which Daille says he can- 
not understand. 



116 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

He the less their Discipline!*, are these the less His lessons 
and rules, because the noises of sin and lust deafen us, or 
any one, to His glorious voice, blind us, or any one, to 
His presence ? No : He, by his Discipline, made J£s- 
chylus a play-writer, and Palestrina a musician, and 
Michael Angelo a painter, and Malebranche a priest ; 
He, by his Discipline, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab 
omnibus est, makes His human creatures express their 
grief for their lost ones by changed habits, and reverence 
their lost ones by memorials of stone, and wood, and 
brass : He, by His Discipline, leads Quakers to pray 
with non-Quakers for common ends, in the One Spirit — 
leads Quakers to unite with non-Quakers in the Holy 
mystery of Marriage. The Quaker Discipline prohibits 
these and other provisions of His Discipline ; it does, 
therefore, fight against God. 

x. Of what acts does the Quaker Discipline, as Peni- 
tential, require the man or woman who is " under dealing" 
to repent? Of acts against the Discipline of the Eternal 
Word ? of unchurchly acts — acts against that fellowship 
with God which is true Church fellowship ? I think not. 
Of acts against the Quaker Discipline ? of unquakerly 
acts ? I think so. 

Thus, the Discipline of Quakerism prohibits the mar- 
riage of Quakers with non-Quakers. When such a mar- 
riage has taken place, the Discipline requires it to be 
repented of. in accordance with the delusion of the first 
Quakers, that Quakerism was to be the Society of re- 
deemed men and women, and non-Quakerism the Society 
of reprobate men and women. But Marriage, wheu it 



CHAP. III.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 117 

fulfils its Idea, is a Sacrament of the union between 
Christ and His Church. It is an outward and visible 
type of His self-sacrificing love for her, of her devotion 
and passion for Him. It is the seal of that love of two 
persons for one another, which neither of them ever has 
had, or ever can have, for any one else at all. There is 
the Divine root and reason for their wedding ; it is a part 
of the Order of God that these two should be one. 
Such a marriage cannot have its ground in the depraved 
and worldly self-will which fights against the Order of 
God, and puts itself under the sharp knife of His Disci- 
pline. Do not these penitential provisions of the Quaker 
Discipline fight, therefore, against God's Fatherly Order 
and Discipline, when they call upon that Quaker or 
Quakeress to assume, in reality or pretence, the position 
of a penitent, who has at the same time the answer of 
his or her nature and conscience that there is nothing 
really to repent of, that the marriage is really Holy Matri- 
mony, is blessed by the Priestly Benediction of Jesus ? 



118 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 



CHAPTER IV. 

i. The Quakers carry to the extreme the Puritan Hatred of 

Tradition — Puritanism too Traditional, 
ii. Quaker attempt to cut away Tradition at the Root, 
iii. Quakerism Traditionalized, especially by the Discipline, 
iv. Vindication of the Catholic Church in Quaker Discipline, 

when defending itself. 
v. The Living Word the Rule of earlier Quaker Discipline ; 

the " Written Words" of later Quaker Discipline, 
vi. Traditionalism and Death — Reverence for the Past and 

Life Traditionalism of the Sects. 
vii. Early Quakerism insulted the Past. 

viii. Modern Quakerism idolizes the Past — Mere Preservative 
Aim of the Discipline. 
ix. Relaxation of the Discipline useless. 
x. Tightening of the Discipline useless. 

i. Quakerism, as the last term of Puritanism, exhibited 
in the extreme the Puritan hatred of Tradition. The 
Quakers made this complaint against the Puritans proper 
— that they had never hated Tradition enough. Even 
when they were fighting against the apostate and behind- 
looking spirits of "Popery and Prelacy," they seemed 
still to be looking behind. What was their weapon in 
that warfare ? The Bible. The Quakers would address 
them in some such strong and dangerous language as 



CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 119 

this : 'Your faith stands in a Christ who lived at Jeru- 
salem sixteen hundred and fifty years ago, rather than in 
a Christ now living, now throwing His Light into your 
dark hearts and consciences. Why are you so anxious to 
obey the words of the Holy Spirit spoken to David, 
Paul, and John? Obey the words rather which the same 
Spirit is even now speaking to your own very selves V 

ii. When they reached this point, the Quakers undoubt- 
edly fancied that they had enunciated something which 
cut away Tradition at the very root. But the Puritans, 
the wisest of whom were obtuse and one-notioned men, 
instead of recognizing this development of their own 
theories, turned round and accused the Quakers of dis- 
honoring the Scriptures. Nothing could be more untrue. 
Few studied the Scriptures so deeply and reverently. 
They did not dishonor them, they only honored the Spirit 
more. Again and again they asked, 'If the Holy Scrip- 
tures did not bear witness to a Spirit above themselves V 
They professed to stand in the same power, authority, 
and Spirit, as the writers who gave forth the Scriptures. 
The ministers of God, they said, call the Scriptures — 
writings, treatises, and declarations ; and call the Eternal 
Son of God — The Word. " Do not you rob Christ of 
His title, and of His honor, and give it unto the Letter, 
and show yourselves out of the doctrine of the ministers 
of God ?"* Two hundred years, however, have passed 

* (xeorge Fox. Answer to the Exeter General Warrant for ap- 
prehending all Friends , 1656. Also, Richard Farnsworth's Con- 
fession and Profession of Faith in GrOD, by His People, who are in 
scorn called Quakers : Showing that the People of God are no Vaga- 



120 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

by, since these words were written. And these, who 
were witnesses against Tradition are the most traditional 
of all existing Sects. 

iii. In the traditionalizing of Quakerism, the Quaker 
Discipline has been a mighty, if not the mightiest, agent. 
I have already shown that the very establishment of a 
Discipline was, and was perceived to be by some of the 
Quakers, a traditionalizing movement. But, at first, 
though it corrected and restrained certain individual de- 
velopments of the Quaker faith in a living and present 
Inspirer, it did not depress the Quaker faith that He was 
the direct source of authority and order in the Church, 
that is, in the Quaker Society. "Our monthly and quar- 
terly meetings." says the Book of Discipline, in 1103, 
" being set up by the Power and in the Wisdom of God, 
Which is the authority of all those meetings, all Friends 
are tenderly desired and advised carefully to keep to and 
in that authority."* Again, "It is our judgment and 
testimony that the rise and practice, setting up and estab- 
lishment of men's and women's meetings, in the Church 
of Christ in this generation, is according to the mind and 
counsel of God, and done in the ordering and leading 
of His Eternal Spirit, "f 

bonds, nor idle, dissolute Persons, nor Jesuits. [4to., London, 1658.] 
"The Holy Scriptures are the Words of God," is reiterated 
throughout this pamphlet of fourteen pages. 

* Rules of Discipline, p. 112, § 3. [4to., London, 1834-1849.] 

f Ibid. p. Ill, § 1. George Fox asserts the possession of 

an Apostolic, or Patriarchal, power in this matter : " The Lord 

opened to me what I must do, and how the men's and women's 

monthly and quarterly meetings should be ordered and estab- 



CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 121 

iv. In passages such as these, the Catholic Church is 
again justified and vindicated by the mouth of the proud- 
est and most extreme Schism. She was not, then, denying 
the authority of the Holy Scriptures — she was not setting 
herself against the witness and direction of the Spirit in 
individual believers, when she asserted her faith that 
Christ by His Spirit was with her, giving her authority 
to bind and loose, to shut and open, even unto the end of 
the world. The Rules of Discipline are the Canons, the 
Yearly Meeting is the (Ecumenical Council, of the 
Quaker Church. 

v. In the two extracts just given, the Living Word 
and Spirit is asserted as the authority of the Quaker Dis- 
cipline, the Lawgiver of the Quaker Church. No refer- 
ence whatsoever is made to the Holy Scriptures, the writ- 
ten Words of God. The ground taken by the Quakers 
against the three Puritan Sects (Presbyterianism, Inde- 
pendency, and Anabaptism), and the preservation of their 
original witness against every shape of Tradition, made 
this abstinence both natural and necessary. But, a cen- 
tury and a half later, the Divine authority of the Quaker 
Discipline was expressed in a very modified and temper- 
ate way: "We have been much impressed," says the 
Printed Epistle of 1833, "with the value and importance 

lished in this and other nations.' ' — Journal, 1666. Again, 
" Some who made a profession of the same truth with us, 
being gone from the simplicity of the Gospel into a fleshly 
liberty, and laboring to draw others after them, did oppose the 
Order and Discipline, which Gtod by His power had set up and estab- 
lished in His Church. — Journal^ 1678. 



122 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III 

of our Christian Discipline : we believe that our fore- 
fathers in the Truth were graciously favored with Di- 
vine aid in its establishment, and that it is in accordance 
with the simple principles of Church government de- 
veloped in the New Testament."* 

Thus Quakerism, too, is found looking back. As a 
whole f the Rules of the Discipline are aggressively tradi- 
tional. The date, indeed, of its earliest Rule is no earlier 
than 1670; while there are very few earlier than 1700. 
The real rule-givers have been the men of the Middle 
Age, and the men of the Latter Age of Quakerism. For, 
by 1670, the traditional temper had set in with great 
strength, and it has continued ever since. As I have said 
before, not " to obey our Immediate and Divine Disci- 
pline^ " but " to maintain inviolably our ancient and 
Christian testimony" is the motive in all the Rules. Thus, 
Quaker Discipline is Traditional in regard to itself, as 
well as in regard to the New Testament. The Divine 
Word has spoken no new law in the Quaker Discipline, 
ever since the Discipline began. This has struck, with 
great concern, the rationalistic minds of a body of Quaker 
schismatics in America, who have put forth a declaration 
of their present leading as li Progressive Friends." 

vi. The disease of Traditionalism must not be con- 
founded with the healthy state of Reverence for the Past. 
We truly reverence the Past when we remember that is 
one with our own time, in Eternity ; that we have no 
more done with the Past, no more lost the Past, than the 
apple to which this morning's sun has given its ripening 

* Rules of Discipline, p. 120, § 24. 



CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 123 

streaks of crimson and gold has done with the root, and 
trunk, and branches upon which it grows, and has been 
growing, with a hundred other apples. Traditionalism 
connects the Past with a vain regret, and vainer imitation; 
but Reverence connects it with its own present and or- 
ganic life. This is the difference between the partial 
Sects of different ages and the Holy Catholic Church. 
The Sects look back at the primitive age, and say, in con- 
fused disagreement, ' The Church of Christ was Presby- 
terian, or was Independent, or was Anabaptist, or was 
Quakerly, or was (something like ?) Wesleyan Methodist, 
or was some other ist. We must restore, imitate, that 
primitive ist, and then we shall have the primitive Church 
again. 7 But the Church says, l The primitive Church was 
Episcopalian V No ; she says far more than that — ' I 
have,' she says, 'the Apostolical Succession.' The Lord 
said to the first rulers of the Church — Bishops over both 
the teachers and the taught — ' Lo^ I am with you alway, 
even unto the end of the world.' 'I, 7 she says, 'bear 
witness that He has never left me. Whatever my corrup- 
tions, whatever my weakness, whatever my mistakes, I 
have never had to look back for true Sacraments, for a 
true Ministry, for the Eternal Word of Life and Grace : 
I have always looked within. 7 * 

* I have mentioned Wesleyan Methodism in this section 
more as a Schism set np on Wesley's death, than as a Move- 
ment conducted by him during his life. It is but just to give 
his own words. A Mr. Hall had written to him and his 
brother, urging them to " renounce the Church of England.' ■ 
This is part of his answer : — gt We believe it would not be right 



124 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

vii. Early Quakerism insulted the Past. In their 
ignorance of Church history and biography, George Fox 
and his fellows handed over to the Devil the whole of 
Christ's Kingdom between the death of the Apostles 
and the Reformation, and nearly as much from the Refor- 
mation to the preaching of Fox. " I was trained up," 
says James Parnell, the Quaker protomartyr, "in the 
customary way of the worship of the World, which is 
held in the IdoVs Temple, every first day of the week."* 
"It is not enough," says Isaac Penington the younger, 
" to rent from Popery, and to sit down under the power 
and government of the same spirit in another form ; or 
to rent from Episcopacy, and the same spirit sit down in 
Presbytery ; or to rent from Presbytery, and the same 
spirit sit down in a form of Independency or Anabaptism ; 
or to rent from these, and the same spirit sit down in a 

for us to administer either Baptism or the Lord's Supper, 
unless we had a commission so to do from those Bishops whom 
we apprehend to be in a succession from the Apostles. And 
yet we allow these Bishops are the successors of those who 
were dependent on the Bishop of Rome. We believe there 
is, and always was, in every Christian Church (whether de- 
pendent on the Bishop of Rome or not) an outward Priesthood 
ordained by Jesus Christ, and an outward Sacrifice offered 
therein.' ' — Rev. John Wesley's Journal, No. vi. December 27, 
1745. 

* The Fruits of a Fast appointed by the Churches gathered against 
Christ and His Kingdom (i. e. Quakerism), p. 1. [4to., London, 
1665.] On page 6, he says that the Independents are his 
greatest persecutors. 



CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKERISM. 125 

way of Seeking and Waiting, and reading of words of 
Scripture, and gathering things from thence without the 
life."* 

viii. Modern Quakerism overpraises and idolizes the 
Past, — its own Past. And the aim of this Traditional- 
ism, as it appears in the Quaker Discipline, is merely 
negative — to preserve occupied ground, not to conquer 
new. Thus, in 1808, the Discipline apologizes for the 
traditional usages in speech and dress : " We know by 
experience that they are often the means of defence 
against temptations to mingle in the company of such as 
are unsuitable examples for our youth to observe and to 
follow." f The Rules of Discipline are substituted, not 
for the Bible, but for the Divine Light and Spirit. 
Ought not (on the old Quaker principle) the Indwelling 
Spirit to preserve us from temptations and unsuitable 
examples ? Ought not unworldly speech and dress (so 
called) to be adopted from an inward disaffection to the 
World, and not be thrust upon us from without ? Can 
it be any thing more than a hurtful imitation of uuworld- 
liness ? 

ix. But these parts of the Discipline have been given 
up by many Friends ; the giving up has been authorita- 
tively pronounced a venial, not a mortal, unquakerliness, 
by the Society. Clarkson, in the beginning of the cen- 
tury, perceived that if the Discipline of Quakerism "were 

* The Axe laid to the Root of the Tree, pp. 20, 21. [4to., 
London, 1659.] 

f Rules of Discipline, p. 198, § 22. 



126 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK III. 

undermined, the whole building would fall."* " The re- 
laxation of a discipline," says Dr. Schafif, in his History 
of the Apostolic Church, "is always a suspicious symp- 
tom." The Discipline, as I said in the commencement of 
this Book, is the girdle which has held Quakerism to- 
gether: the universal provisions under the head of "Over- 
sight" peer everywhere, see every one, watch everything.^ 
The "Oversight" of the Quaker Discipline has been a 
firm, but, on the whole, kindly, ecclesiastical Argus, and 
has had the power of an ecclesiastical Briareus. To relax 
such an Oversight would not only be picking out ninety- 
nine of its hundred eyes, but also lopping or unnerving 
as many of its hundred arms. How could this increase 
its discernment ? How add to its strength ? 

x. But, if relaxing the hold of the traditional singu- 
larities of the Quaker Discipline upon Quakers, will not 
save the Quaker Society, neither will tightening them 

* Portraiture of Quakerism, book ii. c. i. § 1. 

f Rules of Discipline, p. 184, &c. (§7.) Young men coming 
to London without profession or employment. (§ 8.) Sea- 
faring Quakers. (§ 9.) Duty of oversight over each other. 
P. E., 1827. (§ 10.) Disputes to be settled early. (§ 12.) 
Lists of members to be read over once every year. (§ 19.^) 
Quakers in straitened circumstances to be sought out ; to be 
assisted to educate their children in a "suitable and guarded 
way:" for "they may be exposed to mix with others not of 
our religious persuasion." Members, too f§ 7), are to be pre- 
ferred as apprentices, servants, assistants: "A preference 
which seems to form an essential part of the care which we 
owe to our religious body." 



CHAP. IV.] THE DISCIPLINE OF QUAKEEISM. 127 

save it. The very conjecture of a relaxation proves that 
they are thought too tight — that any additional stringency 
would be accounted an overstraining — would lead, most 
likely, to an immediate schism.* 

* A pamphlet, entitled An Address to the Society of Friends, on 
their excommunicating such of their Members as Marry those of other 
religious Professions [London, 1808], points out the decline of 
the Society in Scotland and Wales, "in consequence of the 
increase of Church power and inquisitorial authority. ,, 



BOOK IV. 

QUAKER CONDUCT. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PRINCIPLE OF EARLY QUAKER CONDUCT. 

i. Question of this Book stated — The Motive Principle of 

early Quaker Conduct. 
ii. Motives of Conduct, many. 

iii. Resolution of many into one — The Inspiring Will of God. 
iv. This Inspiration the Ideal Motive of early Quaker Con- 
duct : Doctrinally, Practically. 
v. This Principle not Quakerly, as such — The Catholio 

Principle, 
vi. This Principle a Source of Strength to Quakerism, as 

such, 
vii. Quakerism appeals to the Church for the Confirmation 

of this Principle, 
viii. Relation of this Principle to the Decay of Quakerism, as 
such. 

i. I propose in this Book to inquire, Whether Quaker 
Conduct throws any light on the causes of Quaker Decay ? 
in other words, Have Quakers degenerated ? Is the or- 
dinary life of Quakers and Quakeresses in the nineteenth 
(128) 



CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 129 

century quickened by the same principle as the ordinary 
life of Quakers and Quakeresses in the seventeenth cen- 
tury ? Does this principle produce the same acts? Is it 
present in the same intensity ? Does it offer the same 
signs and evidences of its presence and power ? I shall 
have to compare, then, past and present Quaker principle, 
past and present Quaker acts, past and present Quaker 
intensity, past and present Quaker signs. 

ii. But if I speak merely of the motive principle of the 
acts of any man or society of men — if I speak of the 
ground from which they began to do and to endure — I 
shall travel far wrong. Only those saints upon whose 
spirits God has wrought His perfect work, and whom He 
is just about to take to Himself, can declare from their 
hearts that all motives except the one ultimate and fontal 
motive are dead in them. All men do and endure from 
mixed motives. But every true and holy act or endur- 
ance proceeds, consciously or unconsciously, from the 
Inspiring Will of God. Our good works are not ours, 
nor from us, but from Him working in us to will and to 
do of His good pleasure. Christian perfection ; the 
growth into Christ's spiritual stature ; the full and utter 
iite-creation after the image of the Heavenly Man ; the 
being perfect, as our Lord says, even as our Father in 
Heaven is perfect; — what but God dwelling and acting 
in us can bring us to this state — a state in which the Will 
of God is the one only motive and principle of conduct, 
the ground from which every act and endurance consciously 
proceeds ? 

iii. All the motives which are broken, particular, iso- 
9 



130 THE PECULIUK. [BOOK IV. 

lated, in other men and women, are reattached, and cen- 
tralized, and intensified by returning to their place as 
parts, in the Saint. The love of wife, or husband, or 
children ; the painting of a picture, the giving of alms, 
the writing of a book, the singing in a choir, the visiting 
of the sick, the cup of cold water in Christ's name, the 
very sweeping of a doorway, are felt by the Saint to pro- 
ceed from the very indwelling of the Will of God, that 
Centre from which nothing except sin is really separated. 
All the graces, relationships, powers, functions, and tem- 
pers, which were " natural/' become spiritual — not by al- 
teration, least of all by disorderly mortification, but — by 
carrying them up to their first Spring and Source ; that 
is, to the Bosom of Him in Whom we live and move and 
have our being.* 

iv. This principle, then, was the ideal principle of early 
Quaker conduct. The true and holy men among them 
were led by, listened and waited for, the moving of their 

* " One can spin, another can make shoes, and some have 
great aptness for all sorts of outward arts, so that they can 
earn a great deal, while others are altogether without this 
quickness. These are all gifts proceeding from the Spirit of God. 
If I were not a Priest, but were living as a layman, I should 
take it as a great favor that I knew how to make shoes, and 
should try to make them better than any one else." Again, 
" Some have sweet voices : let them sing in the churches, for 
this also comes from the Spirit of God." "There is no work so 
small, nor art so mean, but it all comes from God, and is a special 
gift of His." — Tauler's Sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Trinity: 
on I Corinth, xii. 16. Life and Sermons, pp. 354, 355. [4to., 
London, 1857.] 



CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 131 

wills, to this action, or from that action, by the Holy 
Ghost. The more sectarian Quakers, whether led by it 
or not, appealed to the truth and fitness and necessity of 
such an inspiration, as the only efficient motive of Chris- 
tian conduct, of the acts and sufferings of Christ's elect. 
In doctrine and in practice, the Quaker Society set this 
forth — that to act in Christ's manner, the Spirit of 
Christ Himself must inwardly move and press us to all 
our deeds. 

v. But when this principle of conduct is undressed, so 
to speak, from its Quaker, Foxite, and Seventeenth-secu- 
lar garments, and shown in its original, undisguised, and 
naked shape, we shall see that it had been the Catholic 
doctrine of the conduct of baptized people for sixteen 
hundred and fifty years before Fox was born. Fox, in- 
deed, and his followers, qualified it with uncatholic and 
fanatical limitations, as I shall hereafter show. But the 
Universal Church had believed, each man clothing the 
truth in his own fashion, from Saint James to William 
Laud (who attempted to dedicate, Music, Art, Learning, 
and even Sports, to God and His Church), that every 
good and perfect gift, whether among charites or charis- 
mata, whether a state of holy feeling or a faculty of doing, 
whether called natural or spiritual, came down from the 
Father of Lights.* And, putting aside George Fox 
and the early Quakers, to what body of men shall I turn 
to find this truth asserted as the only true principle and 
motive of Christian conduct ? I will say at once to whom 
I should not turn : I should not turn to modern Quakers. 

* S. James, i. 17 ; S. John, iii. 27. 



132 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

Undoubtedly I should turn to S. Clement of Alexandria, 
to S. Augustine, to Tauler, to Fenelon, to Malebranche, 
to William Law ; and these (to whom I might add many 
more) were Catholic Priests. They bore that name 
which George Fox and his fellows accounted the very 
type of Apostasy and of fall from the immediate inspira- 
tion of God. They were constantly engaged in all those 
acts which George Fox and his fellows took for signs of 
the absence of God the Inspirer ; they were, what the 
Quakers believed to be, thaumaturgists, players with types 
and images; head- bowers and knee-benders; wranglers 
about clothes, about stone-and-mortar buildings, about 
water-sprinklings ; mere dealers in the unreligious husks 
and shells of religion. 

vi. If, then, the most churchly of Churchmen, men 
who valued the idea of a Priesthood, and their name 
Priest, were the clearest asserters of the Quaker principle 
of conduct, how are we to explain the disconnection of 
George Fox and his fellows from the Church : surely it 
should have seemed their fittest home ? I can but explain 
it by causes I have already dwelt upon, and by the here- 
tical elements which they mingled with this primary truth. 
These I reserve for the remaining chapters of this book. 
But I will state two or three plain reasons why the first 
Quakers, holding a principle so Catholic, yet felt no at- 
traction towards the Universal Church. The sin of the 
Church was one cause. She forgot in Whom she be- 
lieved. As the Apostles, whom the Lord made her 
princes in all lands, could not at the foot of the Mount 
of Transfiguration cast out the devil from the epileptic 



CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 1°3 

boy, so she could not cast out the devils of the seventeenth 
century, because, like them, she forgot the power with 
which her Lord endued her so long as she thought no- 
thing of herself; like them, she dwelt upon her privileges, 
her throne of future power, indulging the thoughts which 
murder true power ; like them, she was jealous when she saw 
others casting out devils in the Name of Jesus. Second- 
ly, it must be remembered that Puritanism and not 
Churchliness, a many-sided Sectarianism and not Catho- 
licity, was the very temper of the Seculum in which 
Quakerism arose. The Church was under a parliamentary 
ban. Thirdly, George Fox and his fellows (with the ex- 
ception of Ell wood, Barclay, and a few others) were pro- 
foundly ignorant of the history of the Church and the 
Sects in prior ages. The conduct of the Quakers, so far 
as it was under the inspiration of Christ's Spirit, was a 
cause of growth to Quakerism, as such, because it was a 
principle England then needed and must have ; a privi- 
lege witnessed to in the Liturgy of the crushed and hidden 
Church, but not witnessed to in the formulas of the domi- 
nant Sects. It pleased God to make it known and heard 
through the preaching of the Quakers. 

vii. In the year 17 00, forty years after the re-appearance 
of the Liturgy and Holy Orders, the excellent Ann Docwra, 
most orthodox as a Friend, thus writes: — " Revelation, 
or Inspiration,* proceeds from one Fountain, and is really 
Divine, although some of the learned have used their en- 
deavors to debase Inspiration. But let us see what the 
Church of England says in this case in her Common 

* Two quite different things. 



134 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

Prayers. First, in the collect for the Communion, they 
pray, 'that God would cleanse their hearts by the Inspira- 
tion of His Holy Spirit.' I really believe that the hearts 
of all men cannot be cleansed by any other means but the 
Inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God. And, further, 
in the collect for the First Sunday after Easter, they pray 
for 'the Inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that we may 
think those things that be good, and by God's merciful 
guidance may perform the same.' This, I am sure, can- 
not be done but by the Inspiration of the Almighty. And 
in divers other collects they pray for this Light and Grace 
of God also. Certainly these men that writ the Liturgy 
of the Church of England did believe that the Light, 
Grace, and Inspiration of the Almighty was sufficient to 
illuminate, inspire, and teach all Mankind, or they would 
not have inserted it so plainly as they have done. It were 
a work unprofitable to pray for that which is not attain- 
able."* 

viii. Hence, too, I think it becomes predicable that 
Quakerism would decay, even when looked upon only from 
this side of primitive Quaker conduct. Its strength lay 
in the comparative absence of the same faith in any other 
body at the time of its rise ; in the then unsatisfied thirst 
which it sprang forth to quench — and quenched. Men 
and women who felt strongly that the immediate and real 
Inspiration of the Spirit was the only principle of any 
good thought or work, not finding that principle asserted, 
or not duly asserted, in the Society with which they com- 

* A Treatise concerning Enthusiasm, or Inspiration of the Holy 
Spirit, pp. 42, 43. [12mo., London, 1750.] 



CHAP. I.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 135 

muned, would go naturally and easily, in those years of 
wild change and transition, into any society which asserted 
its belief in that principle as one of the notes distinguish- 
ing it from the world of other sects. 

But, when the principle returned to its true and eternal 
building, the Church then — that mere tabernacle to which 
it fled for temporary shelter and life — being again emptied, 
would gradually decay, or be taken to pieces for other 
uses, or be blown away in the successive storms of the 
ecclesiastical universe. Individual Quakers may still 
make a kind of passive resting in, and waiting for, the 
Inspiration of the Spirit the ground of their temper, the 
principle of their conduct. But the Bible, Church his- 
tory, Christian life, is sure at last to teach most of these, 
that even that waiting for the Divine Light, that leading 
by the Light, that becoming, as it were, unto Christ 
what a man's hand is unto himself, is not necesssarily con- 
nected with a Quakerly doctrine and conduct, does not 
lead irresistibly into the Quaker Communion. 



Note on Section vi. — Compare the reason given by Dr. Pusey 
for the religions of the Eighteenth Century being unchurchly 
and schismatic, even while religious. " It was the fault," he 
"says, "of the Church, in the last century, or rather of those 
who had the mastery over the Church, that her Ministers, by 
preaching her doctrines coldly and negatively, gave occasion 
to many whose spirit God had stirred, to seek instruction 
rather in the writings of those not of her Communion — the 
old Nonconformists — than within herself." — Letter to the Bishop 
of Oxford, p. 119. [8vo., Oxford, 1839.] 



136 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 



CHAPTER II. 

ENTHUSIASM OF EARLY QUAKER CONDUCT. 

i. Quakers' View of the Motive of their Conduct, 
ii. View of Non-Quakers— Mixed Motives, 
iii. Enthusiasm an Imagination of Inspiration, 
iv. Three kinds of Enthusiasm — The Entheus. 
v. Pure Enthusiasm, 
vi. Malignant Enthusiasm, 
vii. Mixed Enthusiasm. 

viii. Quaker Enthusiasm mainly of the Mixed kind — Presence 
of the Holy Ghost claimed distinctively by Quakers, 
ix. Enthusiam values the Extraordinary above the Ordinary 

Witness of His Presence. 
x. Quaker Enthusiasm did so. 
xi. Short Life of Enthusiasms, 
xii. Prophecies of Quaker Decay during its success. 

i. It was the primitive Quakers themselves who said 
that a Divine Inspiration was the moving source of all 
their Quaker purposes and acts. Some of them, indeed, 
could say it as a Christian experience. Others contended 
for it theoretically ; they put it forward as a view of doc- 
trine distinguishing themselves, the children of Light, 



CHAP. II.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 137 

from all other men — from the children of Darkness, the 
religious and irreligious World. 

ii. Their opponents, however, perceived in them certain 
mixed motives which they themselves did not see. The 
most wonderful actions, the most spiritual signs, may be 
mere appearances — may proceed from the imagination of 
an Inspiration, and not from the Inspiring Word Him- 
self. And, yet, neither the beholders nor the doers of 
such actions and signs may be aware that they are agents 
and witnesses of a delusion. w James Milner and Richard 
Myer," says George Fox, in his Journal, " went out into 
imaginations."* In the same manner, also, the more pru- 
dent of his fellows always explained the aberrations of 
those schismatics who were continually troubling the early 
peace of the Quaker Church, by their fancied and fantas- 
tic inspirations. They did not deny that these men had 
ever had the Spirit ; they said that they had, and had 
been led by Him, and had " made conscience of their 
ways."f But either they had, at some time or other re- 
sisted His guidance, and so been left to their own guid- 
ance ; or else they had valued themselves on account of 
it, and so had lost it through pride. The fathers of Quak- 
erism always preached humility, and the necessity of 

* Journal. 1653. 

f Richard Farnsworth. The Ranters' Principles and Deceits 
discovered, and declared against, denied and disowned, by us whom 
the World calls Quakers, pp. 2, 3. [London, 4to., 1654.] Also, 
<t. Fox's Journal. " Many of them were reached and convinced, 
and received the Spirit of G-od, and are come to be a pretty 
people, living and walking soberly in the truth of Christ." — ■ 
Pages 109, 129, 232, &c. [Fol. ed. 1694.] 



138 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

" keeping low," to those new and fantastical disciples 
who, having joined the Quaker Church in awe and hope 
at its boasted regain of the primitive charismata, imme- 
diately lusted to exercise their new spiritual gifts. But it 
must not be hidden that George Fox himself, and his more 
sober followers, were none of them free from " going out 
into imaginations, " but singularly given to so doing. 

iii. A phantasmal Inspiration, an imagination of a Di- 
vine Entheus, is characteristic of those men and sects 
which have been called in all times enthusiastic. The 
spiritual signs and wonders exhibited by the first Quakers 
had personal enthusiasm as their motive and principle. 
The enthusiastic temper in religion was more preva- 
lent in England during the age of Quakerism than in any 
previous or later age of our history. The bitter quarrels 
between the Presbyterians and the army, left the military 
without any preachers except the Independents. As they 
were contending with the Presbyterians for a general tol- 
eration, for their own sake, they could hardly resist the 
•'rights of conscience" in others. Besides, they were too 
few in number to become army chaplains. Hence the 
officers, and the "gifted brethren" preached to the sol- 
diers ; and they forced themselves, too, into the parish 
pulpits of such towns or villages as chanced to be near 
them. " Learning, good sense, and the rational interpre- 
tation of Scripture," says the Puritan Neal, " began to be 
cried down, and every bold pretender to Inspiration was 
preferred to the most grave and sober divines of the age.* 

* The " most grave and sober divines of the age," Jeremy 
Taylor, Bishop Sanderson, Herbert Thorndike, Dr. Henry 



CHAP. II.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 139 

Some advanced themselves into the rank of prophets, and 
others uttered all such crude and undigested absurdities 
as came first into their minds, calling them the dictates of 
the Spirit within them."* Edwards, Pagitt, Featly, and 
Walker, give catalogues of the sectaries, f But many of 
the errors they set forth were never organized into distinct 
societies. Many of those called Seekers, Banters, Per- 
fectionists. Anti-scripturists, Enthusiasts, and even Beh- 
menists,% may have passed easily into Quakerism, absorb- 
ing, as it did, the extreme development of all the leading 
tendencies of that Seculum. All Schisms are enthusiastic 
in their early days ; and nearly all, partly as the result, 
and partly as the justification for their schism, put for- 
ward their possession of the charismata which belonged 
de facto to the primitive Church — and do still belong, I 
suppose, in posse and de jure, to the Catholic Church — as 
the principle which distinguish es their conduct from that 

Hammond, &c, were not permitted, or only permitted, to be 
heard. 

* History of the Puritans, vol. ii. p. 421. [London, 8vo., 
1837.] 

f Dr. Thomas Price, in "his History of Protestant Nonconformity, 
contends that these catalogues of lesser sects are "ridiculous 
productions of party zeal." — Vol. ii. p. 508. But no one will 
think so who has spent some months, as I have, over the 
immense collection of Tracts of that period, given by George 
III. to the British Museum. Every sect, even Quakerism, had 
its sects. 

J I do not think it has ever been noticed that Giles Calvert, 
the publisher of the first Quaker Tracts, was also publisher 
of the English translations of Behmen. Some early passages 
of Fox's Journal are singularly Behmenistic. 



140 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

of the Apostate Churches, Sects, and the World. From 
the Montanists to the Mormonites it has been so : the 
singular gift of the Holy Ghost is offered as the key to 
the broad and strange difference between their own com- 
mon daily conduct, and that of the rest of men. Enthu- 
siasm was the form under which the best theologians of 
the age contemplated Quakerism. When Charles Leslie 
entered upon the Quaker controversy, nearly half a cen- 
tury of conflict and change had wrought the Schism into 
a compact, set, and definite institution. " Quakerism," 
he says, " is but one branch of Enthusiasm, though the 
most spread and infectious of any now known in this part 
of the world."* Of Enthusiasm in the ordinary sense, 
however, there was little in that cold age when William 
the Third was King, and Burnet a Bishop. When the 
pseudo-liberal writers of that dark time speak of Enthu- 
siasts, as they so contemptuously do, they mean high- 
minded non-jurors, like the holy Bishop Ken, or like Les- 
lie himself. 

iv. Spiritual words are often brought so low as to 
mean the corruption of, or the substitution for, the things 
implied in their derivation ; and not the things themselves. 
Thus, Enthusiasm, which in the pure sense can only mean 
the state of Entheus (iv and ©so*), the state of being, 
living, and having every motive in God, has come to 
mean, in the conventional sense, the state in which men 
apparently are, live, and have every motive in God ; but 
are essentially living and moving from a spiritual self- 
delusion and lie. 

* Snake in the Grass, [Works, vol. iv. p. 3, Oxford ed.] 



CHAP. II.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 141 

The mystical writers who have anatomized Enthusiasm, 
loth to give up so pure a word to impure uses, divide 
Enthusiasm into kinds. The well-known Thomas Hartley, 
author of The Sabbath of Best, and formerly parish 
priest of Winwick, in Northamptonshire, the friend of 
"William Law, and English editor of Swedenborg, dis- 
tinguishes three kinds of Enthusiasm — the Pure, the 
Malignant, and the Mixed. 

v. Pure Enthusiasm is that condition of actual and 
perfecting enlightenment, by the indwelling and moving 
of the Spirit of God, of which I have spoken (in the 
first chapter of this Book) as the ideal motive and prin- 
ciple of Quaker conduct. It has been, I also said, the 
Catholic principle of Christian conduct every where and 
at all times. The Prophet Joel foretold it as the charac- 
teristic of the coming Kingdom of God. Mr. Hartley, 
however, seems to make this Enthusiasm dependent more 
on the consciousness of an Inspiration, than on a real 
Inspiration itself. He speaks of its short duration, and 
of the sharp and biting trials which follow it. 

vi. Malignant Enthusiasm is that kind which we call 
Fanaticism ; the motive principle of Inquisitors ; of the 
English attempters at a "godly thorough Reformation ;" 
of the early Anabaptists ; of the Familists, Muggle- 
tonians, and Fifth Monarchy men. 

vii. Of Mixed Enthusiasm I have been speaking 
throughout this chapter. It is that state of the Christian 
life in which the Inspiration of Christ's Spirit is present 
indeed, but mixed with much infirmity of the unmortified 
Adam's nature, and viewed through the prejudices and 



142 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

deceptions of education, of unsubdued evil habits, and of 
uncorrected wrong theories. This it is which historians 
and theologians ordinarily mean when they speak of En- 
thusiasm.* 

viii. All the early acts and writings of the Quakers 
bring evidence to the predominating power which this 
Enthusiasm had over their daily conduct. The tracts of 
Fox, Naylor, Burroughs, Parnell, Farnsworth, Howgill, 
and all the a??fc-Barclay and Penn Quakers, are " given 
forth in the Name of the Lord." The reader is urged 
and entreated to accept them as "God's words" and 
threatened if he does not. So that no mistake may be 
made, one and all take pains to show that they are of the 
same authority as the Bible. Not because they accord 
with the Bible, nor because they reproduce it ; but be- 
cause they are " given forth from the same Spirit Who 
spake God's Words" through Moses, David, Isaiah, and 
Saint John. On the decay of the epoch of Enthusiasm, 
and the introduction of the scholastic epoch of Barclay, 
Keith, and Penn, these enthusiastic views were immedi- 
ately modified. Baxter gives this as one of his reasons 
for suspecting that Popery was at work underneath Quak- 
erism, " their disgracing and secret undermining of the 
sufficiency of Scripture," and "their asserting of the 
necessity of a Judge of controversy above Scripture." f 

* See Thomas Hartley. A Discourse on Mistakes concerning 
Religious Enthusiasm, Experiences, frc, pp. 34, 35, 46, 47. [Ger- 
mantown reprint, 8vo., 1759.] 

f The Quakers'' Catechism; or, the Quakers questioned, their Ques- 
tions answered, and both published. [Loudon, 4to., 1655.] Third 
Preface. 



CHAP. II.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 143 

" I do believe the Scriptures," says Robert West, and 
then he proceeds to tell his Puritan antagonist that he 
11 is moved to put to him these queries : — Whether Abel's, 
Noah's, and Abraham's rule of life and conduct was the 
Scriptures, seeing there was none, as I know ? Whether 
there be any other rule of life aud ground of faith for 
Christians now ? If not, whether their rule of faith and 
ground of life was not before the Scriptures, yea, or nay ? 
Whether the Apostles' rule of life and ground of faith, 
when they were sent forth to preach, was visible or in- 
visible — things ready to their hand, or other men's 
lives ?" * 

iv. Such Enthusiasts may be real possessors of the 
Divine Inspiration, but they mistake the purpose, mea- 
sure, and spheres of that awful Presence. It is their 
custom to account the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit a 
more sure confirmation of their doctrine than the ordinary. 
Unconsciously, perhaps, but really, they make Balaam a 
man more full of God than His own quiet Saints. All 
their conduct tends to exalt those accidental, temporary, 

* Questions propounded by the Natural Man, and answered by the 
Spiritual Man, p. 10. [London, 4to., 1657.] See also, The 
Word of the Lord which John Cam and Francis Howgill was moved 
to declare and write to Oliver Cromwell, who is named Lord Pro- 
tector, F. Howgill's begins in this manner : — " The word of the 
Lord came unto me the thirty-first day of the first month, about 
the ninth hour, as I was waiting upon the Lord in James's 
Park, London. "—P. 8. [4to., 1654.] "As I lay in bed at 
Bristol, the word of the Lord came unto me. that I must go 
back to London."— George Fox, Journal, 1667, p. 315. [Fol. 
ed. 1694.] 



144 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

aud special graces, with which the Divine Word some- 
times endues men in great historical crises, above those 
necessary and eternal graces, without which a man cannot 
be a Christian at all ; the gratice gratis (and even ingratis) 
data, above the gratice gratum facientes ; the gifts and 
powers which separate them from their brethren, above 
those which teach them their unity with them — above the 
Baptism which speaks of a common childhood unto God 
— above the Holy Communion in which they partake of a 
common Body and Blood from the One Saviour ; their 
special Priesthood above their common Sonship. 

x. And what is here predicated of the genus belongs 
to the species. The English Enthusiasts of the Seven- 
teenth Century, called Quakers, made their possession of 
the Spirit the distinguishing mark between their conduct, 
— as the Peculium, and that of all other people, — as the 
World. And, as the sign and evidence of that posses- 
sion, they did not point to their victorious faith, their 
charity, or self-sacrifice, so much as to their power over 
devils, their gifts of healing, their divine messages, and 
their utter rejection of all sacramental media between the 
Holy Spirit and their spirits. I have no doubt that 
their firm faith in Christ, the Light and Inspirer of 
every human being, was the chief reason of their won- 
derful successes. But I believe, too, that their fancy of 
a Divine Inspiration toward definite lines of conduct, 
which are a mighty hindrance to the Kingdom of God, 
was also a help to the success of the Society of George 
Fox; for these satisfied the diseased longings of that 
enthusiastic and fanatical Seculum. 



CHAP. II.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 145 

xi. The short life of Enthusiasms is one of the recog- 
nized certainties of ecclesiastical history. " Enthusiasm 
may be very pleasing for a time," says Henry Dodwell, 
"but I never remember it to have lasted above a genera- 
tion."* It seems to be communicable from fellow to fel- 
low, but not from parent to child. The success of Quak- 
erism, so far as it was dependent upon Quaker conduct, 
may be partly accounted for by the Enthusiasm of its first 
preachers. But, in that hour of success, by the very na- 
ture of that success, every one who could discern the signs 
of the Kingdom of God, predicated decay. 

Albeit, this decay was not quite so utter, nor quite so 
near, as these predicters expected. Quakerism was not to 
pass out of the spiritual firmament with the meteorlike 
rapidity of those Enthusiasms which arose just before it 
and with it (Quinto-monarchianism, Familism, Muggle- 
tonianism, and Ranterism), and which for some time were 
thought equally, or even more, important and full of life. 
Quakerism, then, like Presbyterianism, Independency, and 
Anabaptism, contained something, or modified something, 
or adopted something, which preserved a staid life in it 
after the death of its Enthusiasm had made its growing 
life impossible. The Eighteenth century, as well as the 
Seventeenth, found something in Quakerism which pleased 
and satisfied its own Secularity. I hope to show this in 
the Fifth Book of the Essay. 

xii. I will conclude this chapter by one of these prophe- 
cies of the time when Quakerism shall be no more, made 
from the firm standpoint of the Church. " These small 

* Letter to Dr. Lee. 

10 



146 THE PECULTUM. [BOOK IY. 

tracts, published on several occasions, I thought not 
amiss (that they be not lost) to gather together and bind 
up in these two volumes, and put them into the Bodleian 
Library; that, in future times, such as shall be inquisitive 
into such matters may thence understand what kind of 
people they are who are now called Quakers."* 



Note on Section ix. — For some most noble remarks on the 
matter treated in this section, see a sermon preached by Dr. 
Hickes (afterwards Dean) before the University of Oxford, 
July 11, 1680 : The Spir.it of Enthusiasm Exorcised. [London, 
4to., 1680, pp. 46.] It was partly called forth by, and partly 
an answer to, the works of Barclay and Keith. How little 
then thought the high-principled and conscientious Priest, 
that in a few short years he himself would be thrust, as a 
non-juror, from all his offices, and be proclaimed an Enthusi- 
ast and a blasphemer by the loose and popular party scribblers 
of the triumphant Whigs ! As, for instance, in the Independ- 
ent Whig, vol. i. p. 6Q, &c. &c. 

* MS. memorandum of John Wallis, D. D., Geom. Prof., 
Oxon, April 12, 1701, to two collections of George Keith's 
Tracts, marked* 8vo., A. 83, Th. and 8vo., F. 95, Th. Also an- 
other volume of Tracts, with the author's note of gift. See 
Reliquio3 Hearniance, vol. i. p. 7. [Oxford, 1857.] 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 147 



CHAPTER III. 

i. Other motives of Quaker conduct. 
ii. Process of Reasoning in Fanaticism, 
iii. Old Testament Character of Signs exhibited by Quaker 

Fanaticism, 
iv. Instance from George Fox's Journal. 
v. A Meteor of the Age — Signs shown by Puritans against 

Quakers, as the Divine Condemnation of Quakerism, 
vi. Used by Quakers against Puritans, 
vii. Fanaticism inherent in the Quaker Schism, 
viii. The New Nature a Quaker Nature. 
ix. The Appeal to Fear. 

i. The Divine gift of the Inspiring Light, and the per- 
sonal Enthusiasm which was mingled and confused with 
that gift, did not exhaust all the motives of primitive 
Quaker conduct. The Age demanded that third species 
of Enthusiasm — the Fanatical temper, or Enthusiasm run 
mad. The signs they gave that their Inspiration was 
valid were the customary signs of fanatics. 

ii. I say, "the Age demanded, " for I believe that such 
a temper and such signs are nearly always called forth 
more as answers to a demand from without, more as a de- 
lusion of the understanding, than as an impulsion of the 
will. Great Fanatics are usually reasoners. Though 
essentially false reasoners, yet, to a certain extent, and 



148 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

upon their own premises, they reason truly. As each of 
the numerous Sects of that epoch supposed itself to be 
the true Church, and the restorer of Christ's Discipline ; 
so each felt called upon to exhibit the Church's pre- 
rogative, and work the Church's miracles, and show the 
Church's signs, according as each apprehended that pre- 
rogative, those miracles and signs. Thus, if the Presby- 
terian Sect thought the office of a Bishop, or a Priest, as 
such, hateful to God, and the mark of an apostasy from 
His true Church ; while those of a pastor or presbyter 
were, as such, delightful to God and the marks of a res- 
toration of His Church ; since they also thought it the 
purpose of the Church's life to root out apostasy, by any 
means, it followed as a consequent duty, that the Puri- 
tans should neither tolerate the Priesthood, the Common 
Prayer, Sacrificial Communion, nor Regenerating Bap- 
tism. Hence, too, it was quite reasonable, according to 
fanatical reasoning, that the Presbyterian ministers should 
allow such a sign to take place as this which is recorded 
by Ann Docwra : "In those days the Common Prayer- 
Book was tied to the Troopers' horses' tails in some 
places, and the boys ran after it. This made sport for 
those priests [pastors] that clamored against it in the 
pulpit, and their followers. This was Francis Bugg's 
established Church and ministry [Presbyterianism] that 
he clamors so much against the Quakers for their going 
into their steeplehouses, in many of his books. I never 
heard that the Quakers, so called, disturbed the Episcopal 
clergy in their worship by going in amongst them ; they 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 149 

only disturbed F. Bngg's established ministers of the late 
professing times."* 

Again, if, as the Puritan preachers and justices believed, 
their "godly thorough reformation" was the peculiar and 
cherished work of God ; and every opposition and hind- 
rance to their "reformation" the work of the Devil ; and 
if their due line of conduct lay, as they believed, in put- 
ting down hinderers, and shutting the mouths of oppo- 
nents by all national and legal means — did it not neces- 
sarily follow, as the consequent to such premises, that the 
imprisonment of Quakers, Churchmen, and Papists, was 
the due line of conduct for preachers to urge and justices 
to exercise ? Here, also, it was the reasoning which landed 
the enthusiasts in Fanaticism. So, too, if, as nearly all 
enthusiasts believe, (and therefore Quakers as enthusiasts,) 
the exercise of Divine Potvers, or of divinely ordered 
Signs, is the one ever-necessary witness of the possession 
of the Divine Spirit ; and if, secondly, they regard the 
extraordinary and non-moral powers of the Spirit as a 
higher witness than the ordinary and moral powers ; and 
if, thirdly, they believe that only the true Church can ex- 
ercise these powers, or hold authority to show these signs ; 
and, fourthly, if they believe themselves to be the only 
trne Church : then, necessarily, they will assert their own 
ability and their own right to exercise them. Thus, from 
S. John's catholic doctrine of the indwelling Light of 
Christ, they deduced, through a series of enthusiastic 

* An Apostate Conscience Exposed, part ii. [London, 8vo., 
1700, pp. 22.] 



150 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

premises, their own fanatical doctrine of a constant and 
perceptible guidance. 

iii. This accounts for the peculiar character of the 
Signs exhibited by the Quaker fanatics. The Bible was 
the only book read by Quakers ; and although their lan- 
guage seemed to depose Holy Scripture, amongst them, 
from that high place which it held amongst others, no 
Christians really depended so much upon it, copied it so 
entirely and yet unconsciously, in their conduct. But, 
over them, as over the prior and less logical Sects of 
Puritanism, the Saints of the Old Covenant had greater 
power and attraction than the Saints of the New. St. 
Paul says: "Be ye followers of me, even as I am of 
Christ." Now, the following of Christ, as a rule of 
Christly conduct, was a thought which the old Quakers, 
because of their loose and uncertain view of the Incarna- 
tion, could not grasp. An inward urging by Christ's 
Spirit was the only rule of Christly conduct which they 
could grasp. Both rules of conduct are, doubtlessly, 
taught us by the Church ; we are sure to be sufferers if 
we lose sight of either. The result, with the fanatical 
Quakers, was that they snatched at the declaration that 
the Hebrew Prophets were inwardly and perceptibly 
urged by Christ's Spirit, with far greater eagerness than 
at S. Paul's invitation to be a follower of him and of the 
other Apostles, even as they were followers of Christ. 
The calm and quiet dignity of the Apostolical witness 
was quite alien to the spirit of that Seculum, and was 
exhibited mainly in the men whom it cast out, such as the 
holy Herbert. But in the startling and arousing language 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 151 

and signs of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, it saw something akin 
to its own theories of the manner of God's message-bear- 
ers. Beginning with a fear of being copiers of The Man, 
all Whose actions were perfect and of an eternal signifi- 
cance, they ended by being copiers of men whose actions 
were partial and meant for a time only. 

iv. "As I was walking along with several Friends," 
says George Fox, " I lifted up my head, and I saw three 
steeplehouse spires, and they struck at my life. I asked 
them what place that was ? And they said Lichfield. Im- 
mediately the word of the Lord came to me, that I must 
go thither. Being come to the house we were going 
to, I wished the Friends that were with me to walk into 
the house, saying nothing to them whither I was to go. 
As soon as they were gone, I stepped away, and went by 
my eye over hedge and ditch, till I came within a mile of 
Lichfield ; where, in a great field, there were shepherds 
keeping their sheep. Then I was commanded by the 
Lord to pull off my shoes. I stood still, for it was win- 
ter ; and the word of the Lord was like a fire in me. So 
I put off my shoes, and left them with the shepherds ; and 
the poor shepherds trembled and were astonished. Then I 
walked on about a mile, and as soon as I was got within 
the city, the word of the Lord came to me again, saying, 
1 Cry, Woe unto the bloody city of Lichfield !' So I 
went up and down the streets, crying with a loud voice, 
'Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield !' It being market- 
day, I went into the market-place, and made stands, cry- 
ing as before, ' Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield ! ? " 
He wondered why he was "sent to cry agaiust that city, 



152 THE PECULIIJM. [BOOK IV. 

and call it the ' bloody city.' "* He afterwards "came 
to understand that in the Emperor Diocletian's time, a 
thousand Christians were martyred in Lichfield. So the 
sense of this blood was upon me, and I obeyed the word 
of the Lord." 

v. That such a Fanaticism as this, exhibiting itself in 
such Signs, was a meteor of the Age or Seculum then 
passing away, is evident by the fact that no new Sect 
dared to announce itself to be the restoration of the one 
true Church, without the witness of such conduct. The 
people around — the raw material for these Sects — de- 
manded such signs. One of George Fox's earliest fears 
(a significant fear, accustomed as he must have been to 
these demands and expectations) was the fancy that he 
had not the Holy Ghost, because he had not gifts and 
prophecies, f Every Sect, not only, as in later days, 
anathematized every other in the Name of God, but they 
each, as they fancied, received a confirmation from Him, by 
direct and terrible interpositions, that they were His Elect 
people, and their adversaries portions of the reprobated 
Apostasy. There are numbers of " dumpy quartos" giv- 
ing accounts, seriously attested by preachers and justices, 
of various manners in which God, as it were, comes out 
of His way to confound the impiety of the Quakers. The 
Puritans constantly asserted that the Quakers were led 
by the Devil ; and this with the most pertinacious and 
dogged injustice. " I have been very often solicited to 
confer with them," says Samuel Eaton, "yet I have per- 
petually declined it, because I looked upon them as a 

* Journal, 1651. t Ibid. 1647. 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 153 

people not only deluded, but given over to the power of 
Satan."* From the very first, the Puritans were full of 
credulities about Satanic possession, and casting out dev- 
ils by prayer and fasting. They won position and rever- 
ence amongst the ignorant, and gave Archbishop Whitgift 
great trouble by these means. 

vi. The " dumpy quartos" and other pamphlets by 
Quakers, describing God's singular vengeance upon the 
apostate Sects, are still more numerous. There was a 
great judgment upon Derby, and George Fox saw, he 
said, the visitation of God's love pass away from it, be- 
cause it did not regard his witness, but imprisoned 
him.f At Tickhill, he says, the " priest" [Puritan 
preacher] scoffed at them and called them Quakers ; the 
Lord's power "so came over him that he fell a-trembling 
himself."J At Wakefield, the Independent preacher, of 
whose society James Naylor had been a member, " fed his 
people with hellish lies," and "told them that I (George 
Fox) rode a great black horse, and was seen in one country 
upon my black horse in one hour, and in the same hour 
in another country three score miles off. The Lord soon 
after met this envious priest, and cut him off in his wicked- 
ness.'^ Again, at Carlisle, he says, "The Lord God cut 
off those two persecuting justices. "|| In Somersetshire, a 
man who "lolled his tongue out of his mouth, and so made 
sport for his wicked followers," in the Quaker's meeting, 
"as he went back from the meeting, a bull struck his horn 

* The Quakers Confuted. [4to., London, 1654.] There is a 
life of S. Eaton in Palmer's Nonconformists Memorial, vol. ii. 
f Journal, 1651. % Ibid. 1652. § Ibid. || Ibid. 1654. 



154 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK. IV. 

under the man's chin into his throat, and stuck his tongue 
out of his mouth ; so that it hung lolling, as he had used 
it before in derision in the meeting. Thus he that came 
to do mischief among God's people was mischiefed him- 
self."* When he was in Lancaster Gaol, he says, " Old 
Preston's wife, of Howker, used many abusive words to 
me. But the Lord cut her off, and she died a miserable 
death. "f 

vii. Fanaticism always decays. When the primitive 
generation of Quakers had passed away, their doctrinal 
and scholastic successors were ashamed of the conduct 
which had been so helpful in the up-building of their own 
Schism. They apologize for it — attempt to explain it 
away. So Sewell, the Quaker historian, a cool-headed 
scholar, and not the least of an enthusiast, endeavors to 
make the fanatical excesses of the first and best Quakers 
to be mere accidents of the establishment of the Quaker 
Schism. J But, as they appear in Fox's Journal, we see 
that they are inherent in the very life of that work of 
which he believed himself the carrier-on by God's Inspira- 
tion. He says that "William Sympson was moved of 
the Lord to go, at several times, for three years, naked 
and barefoot, for a sign. And sometimes he was moved 
to put on hair-sackcloth, and to besmear his face." 
Again, he says, "Robert Huntingdon was moved of the 
Lord to go into Carlisle steeplehouse with a white sheet 
about him, amongst the great Presbyterians and Inde- 

* Journal, 1659. f Ibid. 1660. 

\ History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian Peo~ 
pie called Quakers. London, fol. 1722. Preface. 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 155 

pendents there, to show them that the surplice was com- 
ing up again ; and he put a halter about his neck, to show 
them that a halter was coming upon them." Again, after 
other instances, he adds : " Many warnings of many sorts 
were Friends moved, in the power of the Lord, to give 
unto that generation ; which they not only rejected, but 
abused Friends, calling us giddy-headed Quakers."* 
These are instances from one or two pages only. The 
book is studded with them. 

viii. All the contemporary writers who have left any 
record of their interviews with the first Quakers, speak of 
their fanaticism in deed and word as the very rule and 
habit, not the exception, of Quaker conduct. In July, 
1656, Evelyn, being at Ipswich, " bad the curiosity to 
visit some Quakers here in prison — a new fanatic sect of 
dangerous principles, who show no respect to any man, 
magistrate, or other, and seem a melancholy, proud sort 
of people, and exceedingly ignorant." f Richard Baxter 
says that when he was' ill in his bed-chamber the Quaker 
missionaries (having confronted his assistant in the 
church) sent him paper upon paper, in which they ad- 

* Journal, 1660. "There is not a year," says Leslie, 
" scarcely a month, wherein some Quaker or other is not go- 
ing about our street, here in London, either naked or in some 
exotic figure, denouncing woes, judgments, plagues, sword, 
and famine." — Theological Works, vol. iv. p. 314. [Oxford ed.] 
This was after the great body of the Quakers had grown 
calm, or, as Leslie expresses it, " had gone off from that height 
of blasphemy and madness professed among them in the year 
1650." 

f Diary and Correspondence, vol. i. p. 315. [London, 1850.] 



156 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

dressed him thus : " Thou serpent, thou liar, thou de- 
ceiver, thou child of the Devil, thou cursed hypocrite, 
thou dumb dog, with much more of the like." * Magnus 
Byne mentions another Quaker missionary, who, holding 
a meeting at a house near him, was kindly asked by the 
woman of the house, already a Quakeress in heart, to 
take some food which she had provided. " ' What !' he 
replied, ' shall I eat' with devils and dogs V And, point- 
ing to a dog, ' There's thy companion, thy fellow-crea- 
ture, of the same nature with thyself, — and shall I eat 
with thee, a devil, a dog V And was not this a good 
argument at the first meeting to persuade the woman to 
be a Quaker?" f Another Quaker, he says, "exhorting 
to meekness, silence, and the like, presently falling a-rail- 
ing, cursing, and roaring against priests and hirelings, I 
asked him in patience how these two speeches could hang 
together, — we must be meek, calm, quiet, but he must 
roar and rage ? At the first dash, the man cries out, 
'Thou art a beast, thou art a belly-god/ and the like." % 

* The Quaker'' s Catechism. [4to., London, 1655.] Preface 
to the Reader. It is just, however, to add that the Presby- 
terians, Independents, and Anabaptists are continually com- 
plained of by George Fox for abusive and insulting language. 
When he was in prison at Carlisle, he says they "were ex- 
ceedingly rude and devilish. There was a company of bitter 
Scotch priests, Presbyterians, made up of envy and malice, 
who were not fit to speak of the things of God, they were so 
foul-mouthed." — Journal, 1653. 

| The Scornful Quakers Answered, and their Railing Reply Re- 
futed, by the meanest of the Lord's Servants. [4to., London, 
1656, p. 124.] Preface to the Reader. t Ibid. 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 157 

Again, another, " applying the speech of Christ unto 
himself, * Before Abraham was, I am,' I asked him if he 
was not ashamed — did ever Saint apply that to himself? 
He answered, he understood it of the Spirit that was 
within him."* 

By such speeches (prompted by that Pantheistic tend- 
ency among the first Quakers, which was arrested by 
James Naylor's extreme development of it), it was im- 
plied that the New Nature was a Quaker nature, the Old 
fallen Nature an un-Quaker Nature. It followed, that 
Regeneration came to mean, with many converts, nothing 
more than becoming a fanatical Quaker. The assump- 
tions of fanatics, in a distracted world, always meet with 
mighty success. If such assumptions help to explain the 
growth of Quakerism in a fanatical Seculum, then the 
death of such a Seculum, and the loss and cession of 

* The Scornful Quakers Answered. Another specimen of 
Quaker incivility: "Thou" (Townsend, a Puritan preacher) 
" sayest that it is all one to say 'the Scripture saith' and 
'God saith.' Thou blasphemous Beast, dost thou make no differ- 
ence between the Scripture and God ? or is the Scripture God, 
when the Scripture saith God, Who is the Word, was in the 
beginning? Let all that read this see thy blasphemie." — p. 
9: Ishmael and his Mother cast out into the Wilderness; Given forth 
from the Spirit of the Lord in us that do suffer in the Gaol of Nor- 
wich. That is, George Whitehead, Christopher Atkinson, 
James Lancaster, and Thomas Simons. Again, Edward Bur- 
roughs, in his book against John Bunyan, has such expres- 
sions as this: "The more I rake among thy filth, the more 
vilely and odious it appears," p. 33: Truth, the Strongest of 
All, Witnessed forth in the Spirit of Truth against Deceit. [4to., 
London, 1857.] 



158 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

these assumptions, will help to explain its decay. Byne 
speaks of the simple as being actually frightened into 
Quakerism. His words are: "Such a strong enchant- 
ment I find in this mad carriage, that some poor souls 
are even overcome with their violence, and have thrown 
away, not the Light and Grace of God only that once 
appeared in them, but their reason and humanity too, and 
subjected themselves to this carnal yoke, for fear of being 
still condemned of the Devil."* George Fox says that 
while he spoke "the word of life and salvation from the 
Lord" in Carlisle Cathedral, "the power of the Lord 
was dreadful amongst them in the steeplehouse, so that 
the people trembled and shook, and they thought the 
steeplehouse shook ; and some of them feared it would 
fall down on their heads." f 

ix. The appeal to fear is said to be one of the modes 
of those perversions into the Romish community, so fre* 
quent in our day. If so, it is so because of the assump- 
tion of the Papacy, that no man or woman can be a mem- 

* The Scornful Quakers Answered. Preface. His words are 
the more trustworthy, since from the Quakerly character of 
his own Theology, rather Mystical than Puritan, he could sym- 
pathize with the Catholic truth in Quakerism. Whereas, 
Puritans (even the best of Puritans, Baxter^) could not in the 
slightest measure comprehend how Quakers could he Chris- 
tians at all. " What is the First Principle of Pure Religion? 
The Son of God dwelling in us. He who lives in this Prin- 
ciple is taught to be religious," p. 1. " What is the Talent 
given to every man ? It is that measure of the Light and 
Truth which is given to and manifested in every man which 
comes into the world," p. 2. 

f Journal, 1653. 



CHAP. III.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 159 

ber of the Invisible Body of Christ, and therefore in a 
state of Salvation from sin and sin's end in Hell, except 
mediately through their visible Church. The great body 
of men and women who are looking upon Salvation as an 
escape from physical or metaphysical fire and torment, — 
and not as a victory over sin, a deliverance of the will, by 
the Self-saerificer Jesus, from the slavery of sinning, — 
are in constant danger of becoming the prey of any teacher, 
personal or corporate, putting forth such an assumption. 
The Romish Schism (for among us it is a Schism) has 
plausible things to say for itself to this fearful and un- 
settled body in our day. In the seventeenth century, in 
England, Quakerism had plausible things to say to the 
same fearful and unsettled body. It claimed to be the 
one Holy Church, the only Ark of Salvation ; it showed 
all the Signs of being so which that World, that Seculum, 
demanded. This body of men and women, therefore, were 
at the mercy of Quakerism, and required little more than 
the beckoning of a finger to become Quakers. 

If Quakers could speak to this body in our day, their 
decay would suddenly cease, and a re-increase begin. But 
they know that they would be liars and deceivers if they 
were again to proclaim their Society to be the Ark of 
Salvation, the only Church of God ; and to proclaim, in 
the name of the Lord, all other Christian societies, com- 
panies of apostates. The acting Word of God in His- 
tory has taught them that they are only a private society 
of Christians. Their very righteousness and sense of 
truth are pledged (by their abstinence from these dis- 
proved assumptions) to the necessary decay of their own 
Society. 



160 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 



CHAPTER IV. 

i. Intensity of Primitive Quaker Conduct, 
ii. Signs of this Intensity — Quakerism the whole Business of 

Quakers, 
iii. Reasons— Good Quakers found all Duty to God and Men 
comprised in the Conversion of Humanity to Quakerism. 
iv. Exaltation of Preaching in Seventeenth Century — Wide 
thirst for the Office of Preacher — Every Quaker and 
Quakeress might be an aggressive Missionary. 
V. Reasons for intensity in the less religious Quakers — Honor 
and Credit staked upon the universal Prevalence of 
Quakerism — William Penn. 
vi. Moral Conduct. 

i. I spoke in the first chapter of this Book of the ideal 
principle of Quaker conduct. I showed that it was the 
real principle of the existing Catholic Church, that the 
Inspiration of the Holy Ghost is the only true motive 
of men's good acts and thoughts, that every other prin- 
ciple of conduct except the very life of God within us is 
un-churchly. In the second and third chapters I spoke 
of the mixed motives of Quaker conduct — personal En- 
thusiasm, and the Fanaticism of the age ; and of the 
diseased and extravagant thoughts and actions which 
arose from these motives. In this chapter I wish to speak 
of the intensity of Quaker conduct. I believe we shall 
find that the main distinction between ancient and modern 



CHAP. IV.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 161 

Quaker conduct under this head is little more than the 
distinction between heartiness and languor — between hard 
work and quiet ease. 

ii. In the early days of the movement, Quakerism was 
nearly the whole business of Quakers. It became so, ne- 
cessarily. The monstrous assumption upon which they 
separated themselves from the rest of men, their implicit 
damnation of all the christened and unchristened, made 
the convincement of the whole world their plain and posi- 
tive mission. 

iii. The good Quakers — believing their society to be the 
restoration of the one only true Church, out of which there 
is no salvation — and believing themselves also to be in- 
wardly anointed by the Spirit of Christ to call all men 
unto obedience to Him, to that Lord who is for ever 
standing and knocking at the door of their consciences — 
found their Christian service, their self-sacrifice, their faith, 
their charity towards Christ's redeemed, all pledged by 
their position to the sole work of making proselytes. The 
glory of the Father ; the satisfaction of the labor and 
sorrow of Jesus ; the victory of the Spirit over the un- 
ruly wills of men ; the delivery of Christians out of unsafe 
Sects into the living Church; the salvation of our race; 
the fulfilment of prophecies; the realization of the hopes 
and prayers of sixteen hundred years ; (if the founders of 
Quakerism meant what they said,) depended upon the 
whole Humankind becoming Quakers. To this Eternal 
work, all temporary works and employments must give 
way. Men of every trade and profession threw up their 
really Divine vocations, the duties to which the Father 
11 



162 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

of Order had called them ; and took up the vocation into 
which they were called by the disorderly spirit of Enthu- 
siasm. And everywhere Enthusiasm recognized and re- 
ceived its own. The Quaker missionaries never seem to 
have wanted meat, drink, clothing, a home, money. In- 
deed, Keith, Leslie, Francis Bugg, and others (in the next 
generation of Quakerism), make much of the worldly 
gain, and improvement of secular position, which they 
say accrued to almost all the leading Quaker preachers. 
But the faith given to the assertions of opponents, and 
particularly of perverts, must be slow and cautionary. 
The gain of riches was certainly not the purpose which 
moved the early Quakers to throw up their vocations ; 
the gain of Mankind was the purpose. That, ultimately, 
they gathered gold rather than men, must be looked upon 
as the declaration of the Word of God, through the na- 
tural occurrences of His Order, that their procedure 
was grounded upon a delusion, and therefore could not 
bring about the issue it aimed at ; and that Quakerism 
was not the Kingdom of Heaven, the Catholic Church, 
the ultimate Home of the redeemed Human-kind. For 
His Kingdom, instead of disturbing the common duties 
and businesses of men, consecrates them all as Divine 
callings.* 

* Edward Skipp, an early writer against the Quakers, and 
Baptist preacher at Bodenham, in Hertfordshire, says that he 
frequently asked them what would become of all children and 
all labors, if every one turned Quaker, and neglected them. 
They answered that such things "must shift for themselves 
when Christ's voice calls." — The World's Wonder; or, the 



CHAP. IV.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 1G3 

iv. The Seventeenth Century — that Age of which Quak- 
erism was the last term, the essential expression, the pecu- 
liarly epochal or secular Sect — prided itself on being in- 
tensely spiritual, and on having been called by God to 
restore spirituality to His Church. This Age separated 
Flesh and Spirit, as the method of restoration ; as the 
consequence, it lost all right faith in that central article 
of the Creed, "And was made Flesh;" and it ended by 
becoming more unspiritual in its religion, its philosophy, 
and its life, than all the preceding Ages of Christendom. 
That Age accounted an unceasing organic Kingdom of 
God to be a lie ; a Sacrificing Priesthood to be a lie ; one 
Sacrament a memorial, the other a mockery ; and that 
preaching or hearing sermons was the main business of 
religious men. The office of a preacher was elevated to 
a dangerous height : it was the cynosure of the ill-edu- 

Quaker's Blazing Star ; with an Astronomical Judgment given upon 
the same, pp. 30, 31. [4to., 1655.] 

See William Dewsbury's own report of his examination at 
Northampton. A Testimony of the Ground from whence the Per- 
secution did arise against the Servant of the Most High God, p. 5 : 
" Judge Hale: Art thou William Dewsbury? — W. D. : Yea, I 
am so called. Judge Hale : Where dost thou live ? — W. D. : I 
live in the Lord, and I have a wife and children at Wakefield, 
iu Yorkshire. Judge Hale : Why did you come in Northamp- 
ton, and leave your family? — W. D. : I staid in that county 
with my wife and children until the Father revealed his 
Son in me, and called me forth from my wife and children to 
declare the Word of Eternal Life, the everlasting Gospel I am 
sent to preach to those that dwell on the earth." [4to., Lon- 
don, 1655.] 



164 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

cated, the pettily ambitious, the domineering, the weak. 
Those religious appetites which were not yet so diseased 
as to covet the charisms of tongues or of miracles, longed 
to exercise the charism of teaching. Quakerism gave 
such pleasant draughts to this distemper as no prior Sect 
could give. It said to them : 'You wish you were in the 
ministry ; you say you are not ordained, perhaps not 
called. There is no need for you to have even such an 
ordination and call as the Presbyterians and Independ- 
ents contend for. The call of God (or the Quaker imagi- 
nation of that call) is enough to constitute any man, or 
woman either, a minister. ' Butchers, bakers, farmers, 
justices, herdsmen, might all have this ordination, and 
might be ministers, without forsaking their other duties. 
Nowadays they are so; but then Quakers had a more 
awful assumption to vindicate, a more disturbing and ab- 
sorbent labor of love and sacrifice to carry out : they 
could not vindicate that assumption, they could not carry 
out that labor in its whole iutensity, unless they gave up 
all their time, and their utmost powers, to the doing of 
it. By becoming a Quaker, for a long period, nearly 
every man and woman became also a minister. It is this, 
above everything else, of which the Puritan preachers 
and justices complain in their petitions to the Parliament 
against Quakers, in their sentences against them ; for 
ther ministry was fiercely aggressive. They went forth 
to "call men from their teachers without to the Teacher 
within." Every Quaker and Quakeress was expected to 
be an anointed missionary. 

v. The merely secular Quakers — who entered the body 



CHAP. IV.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 165 

from its attraction for their fancy, or from the conviction 
of their understanding, or from an insight into its adap- 
tation to the religious appetite of the Age, or some other 
secondary motive, — must have rather seen a theoretical 
fitness in a Divine Inspiration as the spring of every act 
and thought, than have been conscious obeyers of Christ's 
Voice in the conscience. But they were as anxious to 
make proselytes, as their really religious fellows. They 
labored for Quakerism with money, tongue, and pen, as 
for that system to the truth of which their own wisdom, 
honor, insight, and advancement were pledged. The 
more quakerly Quakers — those who in the second genera- 
tion still looked upon Quakerism rather as the key to the 
war of the Divine Light in us with the Sin in us, than as 
a set of theses to be made the groundwork of a new body, 
and who took no part in the definitive formation of such 
a body — believed William Penn to be a man of this kind. 
They regarded his aristocratic acquaintances, his finished 
politeness, his parade of heathen learning, his court in- 
fluence, his perpetual appeals to mere national laws and 
rights, with a hot jealousy for the work of the Light.* 

vi. How far the moral conduct of Quakers is related 
to the growth or decay of their body, I have determined 
to leave unmentioned. All questions of progress or retro- 

* See, among others, John Crook's tract, An Epistle to all 
that profess the Light of Jesus Christ within to be their Guide. 
[4to., London, 1678.] He mourns over the decay of their 
primitive spirit, over "their glorying and boasting in the 
Gifted Man, their forgetting all dependence upon the Opener, 
the Spirit of Truth." See, also, William Burrell's tract, A 



163 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

gression here, are fitter questions for persons within the 
Society than for those outside. Certainly Quaker mo- 
rality, however noble, does not arise from what is quakerly 
in Quakerism, but from what is Human and Catholic in it. 

Testimony against Hypocrites and Deceivers, p. 6. [4to., 1676.] 
"As for William Penn, it was pretty clear unto me several 
months, if not years, before I saw him, that he was more a 
Scholar than a Saint, as his writings declared to me, near 
three hundred miles distance. But what he is not I hope he 
may come to be, as he waits to know that Gtod in the pure 
silence of all flesh and fleshly wisdom, Whom he hath so much 
written and talked of. ' ' 



CHAP. V.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 167 



CHAPTER V. 

i. Reflection of Primitive Quaker Conduct in Modern Quak- 
erism. 
ii. Reflection of Inspiration — Unquakerly mode of speaking of 

the Holy Ghost. 
iii. Modern Quakerism one Species of Modern Puritanism. 
iv. Quaker faith in the Principle of Inspiration decayed — 

Hichsism an attempt to revive it. 
v. Reflection of Enthusiasm. 
vi. Reflection of Fanaticism. 
vii. Reflection of Intensity. 
viii. Reflection of Extension. 

i. I have given a sketch of four leading features of 
primitive Quaker conduct, here and there hinting, as I 
passed along, at modern Quaker divergencies. I purpose 
in this chapter a more particular holding up of the modern 
glass to the ancient image. By the faithfulness or unfaith- 
fulness of the reflection we shall see how far the mirror is 
warped, dulled, scratched, or unreflecting. 

ii. In the first place, do the Quakers of the present day 
assert their claim to Inspiration ? Do they point to it as 
the spring of all their acts and thoughts ? Do they put 
it forward as the principle which distinguishes them from 
all other Sects ? Is their conduct the same with that of 
their ' fathers,' in its ideal principle and motive? 



168 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

I think very few would pretend that it is. If we open 
almost any modern Quaker biography, we shall find the 
influence of the Holy Spirit spoken of in the set phrases 
of the fashionable and secular religion. The difference 
between the Quaker and Puritan biographies of the Seven- 
teenth Century, is a chasm which appears to every one 
who has travelled along either of the opposite edges im- 
possible to be ever bridged over ; yet, in the Quaker and 
popular Puritan biographies of our day, this difference 
has shrunk to a little crack or fissure, scarcely perceptible. 
Indeed, one might pass from Puritanism into Quakerism, 
in our time, without having to encounter any mighty in- 
quiry on the frontier land, whether or no he was moved 
by the Holy Ghost to this journey, whether or no he was 
a real partaker of the Substance of God, and a host of 
other queries, which would startle his Puritan conscious- 
ness at one moment with the fear that he was among a set 
of Pantheists ; at another, of Gnostics ; at another, of 
Socinians. Old Quakers would have asked us if we stood 
in the same Spirit as Moses, Isaiah, and St. Paul ; and 
would have thrust us back if we said with Owen, Baxter, 
or Bunyan, No. Modern Quakers would thrust us back 
if we said with Naylor, Pox, and Howgill, Yes. Ancient 
Quakers would demand whether the Scriptures, or the 
Eternal Spirit who gave forth the Scriptures, brought us 
to their gate. If we said 'The Scriptures , J they would 
thrust us back. True, no set of men ever really valued, 
studied, loved the Bible more intensely than the first 
Quakers ; their language, symbols, images, the forms of 
their fanaticism, prove an extraordinary acquaintance 



CHAP. V.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 169 

with it. But when they found men resting on it, wor- 
shipping it, forgetful of the Spirit Who only makes it a 
living Book to men, they called it "dust," " death," "ser- 
pents' food." And to such men it was so. But the 
modern Quakers would thrust us back if we said 'The 
Spirit.' At all events, they would probe our language 
to discover if we were not, in secret, Hicksites. 

iii. Modern Quakers are only Puritans who do not pay 
their Ministers, do not submit to Episcopal, Presbyterian, 
or Independent government, do not war, do not pay 
tithes, do not take the Sacrament of the Altar, have not 
been baptized, do not follow the fashions, with many other 
negatives. Modern Puritans are only Quakers who fulfil, 
instead of deny, these negatives. There is no tremendous 
and irreconcileable bar between them, as of old. The 
Quakers do not now assert themselves as the inspirati and 
inspiratce of God, the breathers and utterers of His ever- 
speaking continuous Bible. Some such language is used 
by Mr. Emerson and his disciples ; but the Quakers do 
not feel any unity with it. The Puritans do not any 
longer point to the Quakers as enthusiasts and fanatics 
goaded on by the Devil to destroy all spiritual religion in 
the name of the Spirit. Both find a common home in 
that Religious World which is the ultimate Catholicon 
of all Sects, and of all the sectarianly disposed in the 
Church. 

iv. The decay of faith in the old Quaker principle — 
that no desire, nor thought, nor act, is righteous except 
as it is a fruit of the Holy Spirit within — is not only a 
token of irretrievable Quaker decay \ it is the token of a 



170 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

decay which can know no restoration. If all Quakers 
should unite to recover this principle of conduct, as 
Quakers, it would be of no use. Individual Quakers may 
do so, are doing so, as Christians. Hicksism was the 
result of such an endeavor. But it made a schism, if any- 
thing, more unlike primitive Quakerism than is the "evan- 
gelical" Quakerism of England. The life of such great 
bodies stands in the Will of God and the need of men, 
and not in the will of the body itself. The principle of 
conduct to which Quakerism witnessed is Eternal, and 
eternally necessary. When Quakerism gave up its wit- 
ness, the witness was taken away from it. Its home is not 
now in Quakerism. The Quakers themselves began, un- 
consciously perhaps, to acknowledge this, when in their 
second generation, their scholastic and apologetic period, 
they grounded every tenet of Quakerism upon the Bible, 
upon the testimony of the Catholic Fathers, and of the 
Liturgy of the English Church. It was a virtual confes- 
sion that every reverent disciple of Saint Clement of 
Alexandria, Saint Justin Martyr, Saint Augustine, nay, 
every faithful user of the National Prayer-book, might 
have the Inspiration and leading of the Spirit, and yet 
not be led into Quaker communion : and, therefore, a con- 
fession that the Quaker Body was not the Social Organ 
of the Holy Ghost, the one only Inspired Church. 

v. If the holiest Quakers do not care to plead their 
possession of the Holy Ghost, in that exclusive sense 
which gave sudden strength to their first fathers, as their 
real Inspirer to every act and thought, it is not likely 
that they will be led by a fanciful inspiration, to claim 



CHAP. V.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 171 

an afflatus of God within, enabling them potentially to 
cast out devils, to discern spirits, to work miracles, to ad- 
minister the Divine judgments. Modern Quakers are not 
Enthusiasts. Here and there indeed, an enthusiastic 
Quaker arises ; but he is an exception, not an example, 
of the tone of Quaker thought and conduct. The great 
body of Quakers pretend to no afflatus. If they did, this 
generation would not answer them. 

vi. Modern Quakers are not Fanatics. They make no 
attempt to exhibit the signs of prophets ; they do not try 
to work miracles. Ask any one, in our day and country, 
who are the most calm, orderly, unfanatical of all Sects ; 
and the answer would be, 'The Quakers.' Every minute 
section of their life — religious, social, political — is ar- 
ranged. The effect of their educational discipline is to 
root out all wildness, passion, and fire, and to give them 
a self-mastery peculiar and so noted that it can only be 
called quakerly. If any one nowadays should astonish 
any ordinary English company, by telling them that he 
had seen a man and woman walk stark naked through 
Colchester or Durham, crying out 'that the Lord God 
had commanded them to strip themselves as a sign unto 
the people,' nothing would so deepen the astonishment of 
that company as to be told also, that the fanatical couple 
were Quakers. If a man suddenly startled the present 
congregation of one of the most thronged churches in 
London, by seating himself on the Altar during Divine 
service, stitching an old coat ; or, by suddenly slip- 
ping up into the pulpit and placing his feet on the pulpit 
cushion, saying 'that the Lord ordered him to declare 



172 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV, 

that Altars and pulpits were unholy,' nothing would so 
incline the congregation to doubt the plain testimony of 
their senses, as the recognition of the fanatic as a noted 
minister in the Society of Friends. 

vii. I have shown that modern Quakers do not claim 
that authoritative kind and measure of inspiration which 
was claimed by their founders — an inspiration making them 
the equals of the writers of the Bible — an inspiration sepa- 
rating them from all other Sects. Yet they claim a cer- 
tain kind of inspiration. A measure of inspiration is the 
theoretic ground of the Quaker ministry. But this is not 
of a nature which makes it impossible for them to be any- 
thing but Quakers, as is evident from the recorded acts 
and opinions of some of the noblest modern Quaker min- 
isters.* 

viii. And this ministry is now the business of few Quak- 
ers. It has lost in extent as well as intensity. Complaints 
of a dearth of ministers are very frequent. The process 

* What is quaJcerly in Quaker Theology is often that which 
modern Quakers most dislike. " I do not like, ' ' says Elizabeth 
Fry, "the hahit of that mysterious, ambiguous mode of ex- 
pression in which Friends at times clothe their observations 
and their ministry. I like the truth in simplicity" (that is, 
the set phraseology of the Religious World), "it needs no 
mysterious garment.' ' What was this lady but an essential 
Puritan, an accidental Quaker ? Again, about the time of the 
Beaconite controversy (1833-34), she writes : "There is much 
stirring among Friends, arising from a considerable number 
taking a much higher evangelical ground than has generally been 
taken by the Society, bordering, 1 apprehend, in a few, on Calvin- 



CHAP. V.] QUAKER CONDUCT. 173 

is the very reverse to that of old Friends : the min- 
istry is left untouched for the sake of business.* An 
orthodox defender of the Society has recently proposed, 
as a provision against this sign of death, the adoption of 
another sign of death — the forsaking of testimony against 
hireling priests ! He proposes that Quaker ministers 
should be paid. " That there is to be found in the New 
Testament a full and clear warrant for the support of min- 
isters when so engaged in the exercise of their calling as 
to be precluded from laboring for their own livelihood, is 
indisputable ; and it may admit of some difference of 
opinion, whether Friends do in all cases go quite as far as 
the general tenor of Scripture would sanction. "f 

But in the sphere of aggression the greatest decay is 
manifest. Originally, the Quakers were the Sect most 
before the world. Their present peculiarity is that they 
are the most hidden and private of all bodies. How 
eagerly certain novels affecting to describe Quaker life 

* Were it not for the Female Ministry, their dearth would 
be more rapidly destructive. Dr, S. H. Cox, whose secession 
was the occasion of much stir and criticism amongst Ameri- 
can Friends, gives it as one of his ;< Reasons for renouncing 
the doctrine of the Society of Friends," that "they are far 
the more numerous bench. Matrons and Spinsters sometimes 
doubly outnumber their masculine co-presbyters, and out- 
preach them in quantity and quality, matter and manner." — 
Quakerism no Christianity, p. 637, 8vo., New York, 1833. 

* Remarks on Seven Letters to a Member of the Society of Friends, 
p. 20, 8vo., London, 1855. All through, the Bible, not the Holy 
Ghost, is the infallible authority and rule of faith. So un- 
quakerly is even an apologist for Quakerism. 



174 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK IV. 

were snatched at by those studiosi novis rebus, the light 
readers of the day. The aggressions of Quakers, too, 
were not made upon the heathens and the irreligious. It 
was the Religious World which the whole of Fox's Jour- 
nal shows that he and his fellows were striving to bring 
to salvation, that is, to Quakerism. Bunyan, Baxter, 
Henry More, and Henry Hammond, were all alike "out 
of the Light." 



BOOK V. 

THE WORLD WITHOUT; EXTERNAL CAUSES OF QUAKER 

DECAY. 



CHAPTER I. 

i. The Seventeenth Century helpful to the Growth of Quaker- 
ism, 
ii. Was the Eighteenth? — Two Symptoms of Decline within the 

Body. 
iii. Loss of Assumption — Loss of Vigor. 
iv. Hyper -Spiritual aim, Anti- Spiritual result of the Seventeenth 

Century — Negative Preparation for the Eighteenth. 
v. A Positive Preparation for it — Materialism— Hobbes. 
vi. Eighteenth Century Dogmas — Supremacy of the State — 

Importance and Reality of the Body. 
vii. Original Spirit of Quakerism hostile to these Dogmas, 
viii. The Age found much in Quakerism itself not hostile— The 
Unchurchliness of Quakerism. 
ix. The Creedlessness of Quakerism. 
x. The Unreligiousness of Quakerism. 
xi. Direct Sympathies of Deism and Philosophism. 

i. I have already said that the Soil Without, that ex- 
ternal causes, condition the growth of the Divine Seed. 
I have shown that it was so within the Divine Seed in 

(175) 



176 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

Quakerism in the Seventeenth Century. But I pointed 
out, also, that Quakerism itself, as a schismatic or 
severed body, was favored and aided by the Seventeenth 
Century. It was, so to speak, the best plant for that 
soil ; and not only so, but the soil was the very kind for 
the plant. Everything in that Age helped Quakerism. 
It met with an extraordinary preparation and welcome in 
that Age. It met with a bitter persecution in that Age ; 
the persecution watered and scattered it. Its universal 
aggression was opposed by a resistance as extended. The 
resistance gave it vigor and emulation. 

ii. Was the next Century as favorable ? Did the 
Eighteenth Seculum tend to the increase or the limitation 
of Quakerism ? 

It is impossible to fix a set period for the decline of a 
religious body. We can only do so for some of the symp- 
toms of a decline. For we must keep in mind that such 
symptoms may be counteracted by the addition of some 
unconsidered causes of life. I think, however, that these 
two symptoms of decline make themselves manifest very 
early in the Eighteenth Century : First, Quakerism 
ceased from its great deeds. Secondly, the great suffer- 
ings of the Quakers were put an end to. The mis- 
sionary aggression of Quakerism upon every other body 
ceased ; the persecution of the Quakers by every other 
body ceased : they neither attacked as they used ; nor 
were they attacked as they had been. 

iii. What was the result of this change ? Ease from 
provocation brought the common fate of Schisms to the 
Quaker Schism ; its emulatory and enthusiastic spirit 



CHAP. I.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 177 

died out. Rest brought contemplation ; and then some- 
thing better was perceived in other men — more of fault 
in themselves ; in these perceptions its assumptions gradu- 
ally declined. Thus the two chief sources of its internal 
strength as a Schism — its assumptive faith in itself, and 
its enthusiastic conduct — grew weaker daily. The plant 
sickened, whether the soil was or was not suitable. 

iv. I think the soil was certainly not suitable to the 
spirit and intention of Quakerism. The change from the 
Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Century took from the 
external strength of Quakerism also. I have said already 
that the forgetting of the Incarnation which was so char- 
acteristic of the Seventeenth Century, and the consequent 
depreciation of the Sacraments, and the attempts to re- 
alize an intense spirituality (the spiritual being appre- 
hended merely as the not fleshly, not bodily), had ended 
necessarily in a gross and general unspirituality. The 
Incarnation has sanctified the Flesh for men in the flesh, 
has taught them how to be its masters, not its slaves ; its 
masters, not its oppressors. " The Eternal Word became 
Flesh," say all the Catholic Fathers, "that men in the 
Flesh might learn from The Man in the Flesh to become 
God." * And it is their constant position that the wide 
and excessive materialism in which the most diverse and 
contradictory of the early heresies finally lost themselves 
in common, sprung from their departing from the Catholic 

* See especially Saint Clement of Alexandria : Exhortation 
to the Greeks, chap. i. 

12 



178 THE FECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

Doctrine of the Two Natures in Him who was the Son 
of God and Son of Man.* 

v. The Hyper-Spiritualism of the Sects of the Seven- 
teenth Century not only negatively prepared the growing 
generation for Anti-Spiritualism ; a positive and dog- 
matic Materialism was also all the while quietly evolving 
itself alongside of the dominant tendency. This subdued 
and quiet tendency had the promise of the Seculum to 
come. The Eighteenth Century was the most essentially 
materialist of all the Secula of the Christian epoch. 
During the Seventeenth Century, this tendency, as yet 
unmatured, was mainly known under the name of Hobb- 
ism. Thomas Hobbes was sending out his Be Give and 
Leviathan at the same time as George Fox was preach- 
ing. Indeed, he mentions the Quakers as one species of 
that mass of Enthusiasts whose principles and works it 
was the purpose of his life to counteract. Amongst 
Hobbists, Locke, the real master of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, the developer of the materialist tendency, had his 
education, though learning little, perhaps, from Hobbes' 
own books."]" George Fox and Thomas Hobbes were the 
most deep and thorough opposites to one another — the 
north and south poles of the metaphysical universe. 
And, as Quakerism in its last result was hyper-credulous 
and hyper-spiritual, so Hobbism in its last result was 

* See Dr. Pusey. Sermons during the Season from Advent to 
Whitsuntide. Preface, pp. xxi. xxii. [2nd edition, Oxford, 
1848.] 

f Mr. Gr. H. Lewes contends that lie never even read them. 
— Biographical History of Philosophy, p. 430. [London, 1857.] 



CHAP. I.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 179 

hyper-sceptical and hyper-material. As Quakerism, the 
essential Ism of the Seventeenth Century, had almost 
explained away bodily existence, had scarcely counted 
the flesh as part of the man, — so the Eighteenth Century, 
in its peculiarly representative Isms, almost explained 
away spiritual existence, counted every spiritual sense a 
physical effect, and scarcely dared to believe the existence 
of God, since He could not be seen or touched. 

vi. And, further, as the Seventeenth Century had 
counted the State to exist only for the sake of the Church 
(which Church, with every Sect meant itself, from the 
Presbyterians to the Fifth Monarchy men, the Quakers 
included), so the Eighteenth Century reversed this be- 
lief, by developing to the utmost the principle of Hobbes, 
of the absolute supremacy of the State. Throughout 
the Eighteenth Century the Church was subordinated to 
the State, became, in the worst use of the term, "the Es- 
tablishment ;" and it was taken for granted by the 
peculiarly secular men, " the men of the time," that She, 
the Spouse of the Eternal Word, existed to serve and 
obey the State. The High Churchmen, who asserted 
that Christ, and not William the Third or George the 
First, was the true Head of the Church, were accounted 
the " Fanatics" and "Enthusiasts" of that age, even as 
the Quakers had been of the prior age.* They — Sancroft 
and Ken, Leslie and Collier — preserved and maintained 
that witness which (under a different form, indeed) Fox and 
his fellows had maintained against Oliver Cromwell and 

* See the Independent Whig, Cato's Letters, the Terrce Filius, 
and any of the really popular Whig journals. 



180 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

the Parliament. Throughout the Eighteenth Century, the 
State and the Body were the universal concern and study 
of Englishmen. 

vii. Was not this a soil peculiarly unsuitable to the 
original spirit and intention of Quakerism, utterly con- 
tradictory to the Idea beheld by George Fox ? Must it 
not have robbed the Quakers of every hope of their uni- 
versal conquest of mankind? Would it not involve a 
fiery battle between the most spiritualist of Sects and the 
most materialist of Secula ? It was utterly contradictory 
to the original spirit — to the Idea of the Quakers. It 
did involve a fiery battle. But in that battle the Seculum 
eventually overcame. No man can be independent of the 
pressure of his age, no Sect can be. Quakerism was not. 
Really quakerly Quakers remained far into the century ; 
such men as Thomas Story.* The strong walls of the 
Discipline also kept many, as it were, in the Seventeenth 
Century after the Eighteenth had begun. But the mass 
of Quakers became permeated with the spirit of their 
time. They gave up their sublime and impossible dream 
of a Universal Quakerism. They gave up that exciting 
aggression, which, under the Spirit's leading, was to 
bring that dream into a fact. They became the most re- 
tiring and unproselytizing of all Sects. They turned 

* But the work of sucli preachers and travelers as, for in- 
stance, John Woolman and Katherine Phillips, was to admon- 
ish, and build up, and purify the Church itself (i. e. QuakersJ ; 
it was not to convince Schismatics (s. e. Churchmen and all 
sorts of Dissenters), and lead them into the true Ark of Life 
(i. e. Quakerism^). 



CHAP. I.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 181 

their energy into Commerce, and made great riches. 
They turned their holy attention to the Bodies of men, 
and to bodily wants; and so, by degrees, they gained a 
national fame as Philanthropists. When they found they 
could not conquer the Seculum, they served it. Thus 
Quakerism preserved itself from a rapid destruction, by 
submitting to a sure and certain gradual decline. The 
ideal virtue of the Eighteenth Century was what it called 
" Public Spirit." The formal decrees of Quaker law pre- 
vented Quakers from exhibiting this virtue. The Age 
took their philanthropy as the Quaker substitute for it. 

viii. I said that in the Seventeenth Century the soil not 
only suited the plant, the Age not only helped Quaker- 
ism, but that the plant also was the very kind for the soil. 
Quakerism suited and pleased the Age. So also the 
Eighteenth Century found much in Quakerism, as a sys- 
tem, which inclined it to spare it and use it; although, as 
au attempt to express a principle, it was so irreconcil- 
ably opposed to it. 

The Unchurchliness of Quakerism pleased the Eight- 
eenth Century. It was the most dissident of all the dis- 
senting bodies. It had thrown away Sacraments. It 
had not «ven the shadow of what could be called a Priest- 
hood, the name most hateful to the atheistic politicians 
and popular idols of that Seculum. Even the men who 
solemnly declared in the face of God and His congrega- 
tion that they were moved by the Holy Ghost to take 
upon them the office of a Priest in His Church, contended 
that there was no such office in His Church ; they sunk 
their souls in unpriestly dissipation, or, at best, in a self- 



182 THE PECULIXJM. [BOOK V. 

seeking literature ; they left the poorer sheep of ChristY 
flock unfed ; and they made of the Church a mere lottery 
for prize-hunters.* 

ix. The Greedlessness of Quakerism pleased the Eight- 
eenth Century. Quakerism and the Age seemed to move 
along the same road in their dislike of the Catholic doc- 
trine of the Trinity. The Quakers had never dogmatized 
upon it. They bad thus many points of touch with the 
Arian tendency of the Age. With its Pelagian tendency 
they had as many. In spite of the protests and assertions 
of Barclay, and the extraordinary Anti-Pelagianisra of the 
first Quakers, the Light Within began gradually to be- 
spoken of as a light, an influence, a natural gift, a reli- 
gious tendency in every man, a part of his ordinary spirit- 
ual anatomy ; not as the communication of the Lord 
Himself to the conscience, the actual Presence of the Son 
within, the Very Light of Very God. 

x. The Unreligiousness which the Age itself begat in 
Quakerism pleased the Eighteenth Century. What the 
Methodist revivalists said of Tillotson, the pet theologian 
of the Age, its really representative Christian, its Whig 
Bishop, its Episcopal Quaker, its unchurchly Churchman, 
namely — " That he might be a heathen for anything the 
reader of some of his sermons could tell" — might be ap- 
plied to the religion of lesser men in lesser bodies. Early 
in the century, the Quakers ceased to publish tracts and 
pamphlets against the religion of the Seculum, for it soon 
became their own religion. But against the religious in- 

* See the most melancholy Lives of Swift, Churchill, Dodd, 
Sterne, and others. 



CHAP. I.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 183 

stitutions of the Seculum, so far as these touched their 
pockets, they not only continued to write, they wrote 
more fiercely. There are reams of vigorous onslaughts 
upon tithes and church-rates, called Tracts " of Suffer- 
ings." The utterly wnreligious tone of these tracts is as- 
tounding. They are mere matters of business ; in the same 
style and language as reports of sales, damages, or losses. 
The very highest ground they assume is traditional — the 
keeping up of the witness of elders. The original Quaker 
ground (false and untenable as it was), of an Inspired and 
Inspiring Message from God against all such institutions, 
as symbols of Idolatry and Apostasy from God, never 
flashes out from these cold books. 

xi. The direct sympathy of the Deists of the Eight- 
eenth Century (both in England and France) with the 
Quakers, is very noticeable. Woolston wrote to Dr. 
Bennett, who answered the Apology of Robert Barclay, 
a vindication of the Quakers, as "the nearest of any Sect 
to the Primitive Christians in principles and practice."* 
A traveller in France found the disciples of Rousseau 
erecting columns to William Penn, as the companion of 
Descartes, Newton, Montesquieu, and their own master 
The Ingenuous Huron of Voltaire is essentially a Quaker 
novel, and might have been written by an ordinary Quaker 
of that Age. 

* London, 1720, 8vo., pp. 63. 



184 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 



CHAPTER II. 

i. Fichte's character of trie Eighteenth Century. 

ii. Is the Soil of the Nineteenth Century Naturally Helpful 
or Destructive to Quakerism ? — Cannot be Destructive 
to the Quaker Idea, because Eternal. 

iii. What are, and are not, Tendencies — The Resistance to a 
Tendency often taken for a Tendency. 

iv. Catholicity a Tendency. 

v. Attempts to realize Catholicity — Common Work — Com- 
mon Opinion— Common Nature. 

vi. Can Quakerism adopt the Basis of Work? 

vii. Or, the Basis of Opinion ? — Destructive to the Quaker Idea 

— To the Quaker Ism. 
viii. Or, the Basis of Nature ? 

ix. Ritualism a tendency of the Age. 

x. Can Quakerism meet this Tendency? — Quaker Ritualism. 

I have given a very faint and imperfect sketch of the 
results of the last age upon Quakerism. I have shown 
that the Idea of Quakerism — the life according to the 
Spirit — was in essential and irreconcileable contradiction 
to the character of the Eighteenth Seculum. The whole 
strength and thought of that Seculum was bent towards 
the everlasting destruction of the basis upon which Quak- 
erism had been built. Its character, as set forth by Fichte, 
was, " To accept nothing as really existing or obligatory 



CHAP. II.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 185 

but that which it can understand and clearly compre- 
hend; in which the Age was right : and further, to connect 
therewith mere empirical and sensuous Experience as 
its sole measure of the Conceivable ; in which the Age 
was wrong." In this chapter I have to notice the affinity 
or repulsion between Quakerism, and the present Age. 

ii. I dare not attempt to give any general character of 
the present Age. I am too much a creature of it. No- 
body sees the battle in which he himself is fighting ; if he 
began to speak of it he would exaggerate, perhaps his 
own cause and success, perhaps his enemy's cause, his 
own loss. But some tendencies of the Age, which no 
one can doubt to be general and distinctive tendencies, I 
can give. I can ask — not if the Quaker Idea — but if 
the Quaker System, if Quakerism, can adopt these tend- 
encies, with any hope of its growth through the adoption, 
without certain destruction through the adoption ? I say 
the Quaker System, not the Idea the sight of which was 
the cause of Quakerism, for I have already many times 
proved that Idea to be prae-Quaker and post-Quaker, 
Catholic, Eternal ; and I have shown that Barclay, Penn, 
and others confessed it, indirectly. This Idea must be 
safe amid the tendencies of any Age, for it has been the 
food and light of all Ages. It could not be removed or 
shaken by that principle which Fichte said was right in 
the Eighteenth Century.* It stands in That which was 
before Ages, and will be after them. 

* Or, rather, as lie says, "in the Third Age," according 
to a hypothetical division which he lays down at the begin- 
ning of his Lectures. 



186 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

iii. In stating this or that movement to be a tendency of 
the Age, I must also state, proleptieally, that the resistance 
to this or that movement maybe also taken for a tendency 
of the Age, although really the very reverse. To steal 
another simile from a battle : If two or three of us, who 
belonged to an army of fifty thousand red-coaled men, 
found ourselves hemmed in and kept in check by a score 
of buff-coated men, we should naturally look upon the 
battle as an onslaught of buff-coatedness upon red-coats. 
When the smoke cleared away and the battle was over, 
we might find that these twenty had been the only buff- 
coats in the field ; but till then our personal experience 
would have been the measure of our apprehension, of our 
time, and our time's work. Those movements, therefore, 
can alone be taken as tendencies of the Age, to which 
there is a wide and general confession — a confession from 
quarters which have little sympathy with one another, 
and no collusion. Though private experience — the 
rising up of self — will be always endeavoring to prove 
itself and its own things the tendency, we shall only 
learn untruth by listening to it. All true insight lies, 
here as elsewhere, in a self -for getting. 

iv. Catholicity is the first tendency of the Age which 
I will mention as a test of the possible arrest of Quaker 
Decay. The search after Universality, the endeavor to 
discover an effectual ground of unity, is one of the most 
open and specific characteristics of our time. It is found 
in the members of the most opposite Sects, amongst the 
holders of perpetually irreconcileable opinions. From 
the old Byzantine Church to the very newest species of 



CHAP. II.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 187 

Theist or Atheist, every thoughtful man is craving it — is 
pointing to some method for the realization of it. 

v. But it does not only exist in theories. Several 
practical attempts at Catholicity are at work among us. 
The Communist Societies, the Evangelical Alliance, the 
Catholic Church, are all professed instruments of Catho- 
licity. Every man or sect hoping to bear a part in the 
development of the tendency of Catholicity must belong 
to one of these Societies, or to some Society founded on 
the same basis as one of these, — on the basis of com- 
munity of Work, community of Opinion, or community 
of Nature. Quakers, as human beings, as born in this 
Age, must be partakers in this tendency of the Age — 
must be thirsting after a Universal Society. This tend- 
ency cannot but go on : a Greater than George Fox has 
set it tending. If, therefore, Quakerism does not assist 
and forward this tendency, it puts itself into the path of 
destruction : if the weaker tries to stop the stronger 
which must move, the weaker is already lost. To save 
itself, it must do with the tendencies of the Nineteenth 
Century what it did with those of the Seventeenth, — 
seize, master, make them its own. Can Quakers trans- 
late the tendency of Catholicity into Quakerism? If 
they can, will they do it on the basis of common Work, 
of common Opinion, or of common Nature ? 

vi. Mr. Francis Newman, in his Catholic Union, or 
JEssays toward a Church of the Future, has brought the 
Churches, Opinions, and Creeds to his bar, and has 
bribed them all to say that they can neither of them 
become the basis of the Universal Church of the Future ; 



188 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

that its basis must be laid on a common determination to 
good deeds. I leave out what might be hinted, namely, 
that such a " Catholic Church" would be founded upon a 
creed, — the creed of Francis Newman : " I believe that 
the Church, the Bible, and the Incarnate Word, are delu- 
sions." The notion is representative, and therefore I 
take it : the Phalansteries, Communities, Harmonies, 
Universal Schemes, Positivisms, coming and to come, 
have the same basis. Can Quakers, by becoming mem- 
bers of a body so foundationed, preserve Quakerism from 
death by the tendency to Catholicity? I scarcely need 
answer. The very existence of Quakerism stands on the 
impossibility of such a Universal Church. It declares 
that the Indwelling of God's own Spirit is the only uni- 
versal bond of men possible. It would become unchris- 
tian if it gave up that faith. Its Discipline gives it a 
basis on which it may unite with other men ; namely, on 
other men becoming Quakers. If it gives up this it 
ceases to be Quakerism, and therefore ceases to be. 
Quakerism cannot master the Catholic tendency of the 
Age by joining in any of its inventions of a basis for 
common work. 

vii. A number of good men who see that an agreement 
to do the same work (in whatever manner the notion may 
be stated*) can never be the basis of a Universal Society, 
of a Church of the Future, believe that agreement in the 
same opinion may become such a basis. The most com- 
plete attempt to realize this theory is the Evangelical 

* Nowhere so well as in Professor Newman's Catholic 
Union. 



CHAP. II.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 189 

Alliance. In the hope and faith of the members, Uni- 
versal Puritanism appears to be the form which the 
Church of the Future will assume. Its creed is so strin- 
gent and narrow that it will have hard work with the 
minds and consciences of men, before it draws them into 
that community of religious opinion which is to be the 
basis of the coming Church. It shows us of what opin- 
ions the external minds and consciences must get rid to 
be admitted within the sacred body. First, we must not 
believe that the Holy Spirit of God is more authorita- 
tive than the holy men whom He inspired, than the words 
which they spake under His inspiration. It shuts out, 
therefore, that important and thoughtful body of Christ- 
ians, the English Unitarians. It shuts out, implicitly, all 
pure Quakers, all the ancient Friends, and every modern 
Friend who follows George Fox more closely than the 
Religious World. Secondly, we must not believe that 
Christ Jesus has already founded a Catholic Church : 
for such a faith would make the work of the Alliance 
futile, and gratuitously useless. It shuts out all Catho- 
lics — English, Greek, Russian, Gallican, or Ultramon- 
tanist. 

Can Quakerism preserve itself from the verdict of 
" Death by the tendency to Catholicity" ? can it seize and 
make this tendency its own, by joining the Evangelical 
Alliance, or any future Body founded on the same basis ? 
I will divide the Quaker Idea from the Quaker Ism, and 
show that both make it impossible. In the first place, the 
Quaker Idea forbids it ; for it is the Catholic Idea — that 
the unity of men cannot consist in what they do } as the 



190 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

Socialists, Secularists, and others have said ; nor in what 
they think, as the Evangelical Alliance is saying ; — but 
in what they are, as the Church has declared for eighteen 
hundred years. The Evangelical Alliance existed, im- 
plicitly, in the days of Fox and Burroughs. They called 
it the World; from it they and all Quakers had escaped. 
The leaders of the ancient Evangelical Alliance, who are 
the heroes of the modern Alliance (Owen, Baxter, Prynne, 
and such men), all believed that Quakers were Jesuits, or 
the tools of Jesuits. The Quaker Idea must immediately 
perish, anywhere but in Quakerism, or in the Catholic 
Church. 

In the second place, the Quaker Schism also anathe- 
matizes the Alliance. Mrs. Fry, Joseph John Gurney, 
William Allen, and some others, have niches in the Hagi- 
ology of the Alliance ; and it invites such Quakers to 
work and pray with it. A holy Quaker may do this as a 
Puritan Christian, as a man who is a Quaker by mere 
accident. But I am sure no true-hearted and quakerly 
Quaker will do so. The whole spirit of Quakerism for- 
bids it. The holy Quaker may say, and say truly, ' This 
body of Puritans meets together for the sake of bringing 
Christians into closer unity with one another : such an 
object must be pleasing to the Spirit of God. I do not 
think I shall disobey Him if I listen to them, perhaps pray 
with them. 7 But Quakerism will say, and say consist- 
ently, ' We profess that we are the body whom the Holy 
Ghost draws together; if men seek unity they ought to 
come to us, amongst whom the Living Source of Unity is 
known as He is known nowhere else. These prayers and 
meetings for which you leave us stand in the wills of men. 



CHAP. II.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 191 

They do not wait for Him to move them ; they move 
themselves the moment they are together.' Every Quaker 
who takes part in their prayers and meetings is shirking 
testimony, violating discipline, giving the lie to his own 
Church. The existence of Quakerism stands on the un- 
truth and insufficiency of Puritanism. The only word 
that George Fox and his fellows had for the very ideal 
of the Alliance, for its end and hope, was — the Apostasy. 
The moment Quakerism, as such, attempts to enter into 
community of opinion with Puritanism (however broad 
and ''liberal " the range of community may be), Quaker- 
ism ceases to be quakerly ; therefore, it ceases to be. 

viii. Another basis of Catholicity remains — that of 
common nature. The Catholic Church says, that the 
Word has become Man, that the Father has united the 
Humankind indissolubly with Himself in the Person of 
His Son; so that she looks upon every being in the world 
as a redeemed creature. No little babe is too ignorant, 
too weak, too irresponsible, to be taken up in the arms 
of the Church, baptized in the Name of the Father, the 
Son, and the Holy Ghost, and claimed for a son or 
daughter of the Lord of Heaven and Earth. The 
Father and the Son have done for that little babe all 
that They have done for Saint John or Saint Augustine, 
Luther or Fox. 

In what relation stand the Quaker Idea and the Quaker 
Schism to this form of carrying out the tendency of 
Catholicity ? Can the Schism, or Quakerism, be saved 
by making this basis its own ? 

I think I need say very little in answer to these ques- 
tions, because the whole of this Essay has been an answer 



192 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK Y. 

to them. I have declared all through it my firm faith 
that the Quaker Idea was essentially the Idea of the 
Catholic Church. I have shown that the Quaker Schism, 
that Quakerism, not only never did, but never can, realize 
the Quaker Idea; that it is always leading Quakers to the 
doubt or denial of it. Sometimes Quakers are moving 
away from the Idea on one side, towards Scepticism ; some- 
times they are moving away from it towards Opinionism, 
on the other side ; whereas the true realization of the 
Idea is always straight before them, betw r een Scepticism 
and Opinionism (whatever shapes in different Ages those 
Isms may assume), in the Unchanging Catholic Church. 

ix. Another evident tendency of our Age in its religious 
character, broadly distinguishing it from the last Age, is 
what is named Ritualism,. The resistance to Ritualism 
is certainly very strong and loud. But note the positive 
conduct of the resisters. They are acknowledging it to 
be too strong for them all the while they are opposing it. 
Chapels and Lecture-halls, where it is preached against 
with great vigor, are themselves signs and results of this 
Ritualistic tendency : they are covered inside and outside 
with the Christian symbols of Ritualistic Ages. Tracts 
against it appear in covers the principles of whose design 
were studied in the breviaries and missals of the Ritual- 
istic Ages. Christian bodies which for two or three cen- 
turies have cried against the use of written prayers, as a 
barrier to the Spirit, are asking for, or adopting, Litur- 
gies as the means of a more Churchly worship. These 
are signs exhibited by those who seem to oppose the ten- 
dency. Add to this those exhibited by the men who wel- 
come, acknowledge, and foster it. Perhaps a revival of 



CHAP. II.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 193 

faith in the Incarnation of the Blessed Word as sancti- 
fying the whole creation, produces necessarily an increase 
of Ritualism. For, by it, things which before were thought 
not only empty of God, but even contrary to Him, seem to 
be filled with the presence of that Lord Who came in the 
despised and unlikely form of a servant. 

x. Can Quakerism in any way meet and adopt this 
tendency ? I need scarcely put the question. Quakerism 
is not merely the vindication of baldness and emptiness ; 
it is the assertion of their intrinsic worth and right. To 
have no forms, no rites, no symbols, no liturgies, is the 
very root of Quaker Ritualism. Here, also, the system 
of Pox and the Seventeenth Century is in direct contra- 
diction to the Idea, the sight whereof made him the builder 
of that system. The nearer the early Quakers felt them- 
selves to the Eternal Spirit, the more intensely Ritual 
they became. Their history is full of their adoption of 
external signs as the witnesses and seals of the ministry 
of the Spirit. They went naked ; they walked in sack- 
cloth ; they covered their heads with ashes ; they wore a 
different dress from the people of the world. They do 
wear it, as a sign that they are not followers of the 
changing world, but of the Unchangeable Spirit. What 
a justification of the alb and cassock of the Priest, as 
representative and minister of the whole flock of God! 
Ecclesiastical History repeats this lesson again and again, 
that when men leave the Church which the Lord Jesus 
began, to make a better Church for themselves, they jus- 
tify one by one each of those marks of the Church which 
they had one by one condemned. 
13 



194 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 



CHAPTER III. 

i. Religious tendencies of the Age fighting against Quaker- 
ism. 

ii. Non-religious Tendencies — Battle of Quakerism with iEs- 
theticism. 

iii. Quakerism weakened by Quaker Traitors. 

iv. iEstheticism not contrary to the Idea of Quakerism, 
v. Anticipated by the Catholic Church — In that which it 
holds in common with Quakerism — In that which it 
holds in opposition. 

vi. iEstheticism contrary to the Quaker Schism — Solomon 
Eccles. 

Tii. In the War between iEstheticism and Quakerism, Quak- 
erism must lose. 

' i. In the last chapter I considered two evident and 
general religious tendencies of our Age. I showed the 
reasons which incline me to believe that these tendencies 
are not only by their nature destructive to Quakerism, 
but are also actively destroying it. The existence of such 
tendencies is a declaration by the Age, of war against 
Quakerism. Quakerism must oppose them and root them 
out, or oppose them and be rooted out by them, or adopt 
them, and so become self-contradictory, unquakerized. 

ii. The same positions are involved in the relation of 
some of the non-religious tendencies of the Age to Quak- 



CHAP. III.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 195 

erism. As a representative tendency, I will take that 
which it is modish at present to call JEsthetic, the pursuit 
of Arts, including Music under that title, and Poetry also. 
No one, I am sure, doubts the existence of such a tend- 
ency. The Art Unions, the increase of picture exhibi- 
tions, the crowding of them, the illustrated journals, the 
establishment of Schools of Design, the extended teach- 
ing of drawing in public and private schools, are signs of 
this tendency in one direction. The extraordinary in- 
crease of musical studies, the choirs and singing-classes 
rising in every neighborhood, are signs of it in another 
direction. Nor will any one, I think, doubt the distinct- 
iveness of this tendency that it belongs to our Age as it 
did not to the Seventeenth or Eighteenth Centuries. Men 
painted, men played and sang, men went to exhibitions 
and concerts, a hundred years ago. But a class went, a 
peculiar world : the people, so called, took no interest in 
either. The ^Esthetic tendency, therefore, is one against 
which Quakerism has never yet measured its strength. 
It forbids it presumptively. Its Discipline shuts it out 
from the holy Society, as an element of the World. But, 
with the exception of Music, it has never found itself in 
resolute and difficult contest with any of the forms of that 
tendency. In this Age it has to test its strength against 
all the forms. 

iii. There is one consideration which must effectually 
weaken Quakerism for such a battle. There is a traitor 
in the Quaker camp itself. As I said in reference to the 
other tendencies, so with this : individual Quakers, born 
and trained in this Age, must be more or less sharers in 



196 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

its characteristics, must be swayed in some measure by its 
tendencies. I know noble members of the Society who 
are active and enthusiastic musicians, painters, and even 
archaeologists. The young Friends are forming Quaker 
Singing-classes (and oddly enough it strikes one to hear 
the youths and maids, one moment violating testimony by 
singing heathen songs to some goddess of a month under 
the name May, and, as soon as the song is over, conform- 
ing to testimony by asking what day of ' fifth month 7 it 
is). The older, " weighty, and concerned'' Friends look 
with doubt or opposition on these things. They dare not 
sanction it. But neither dare they prohibit it ; for if 
they were to carry out Quakerism by putting an end to 
Quakers' Music, Music might carry the singers out of the 
Society. 

iv. I have stated the actual position of the Quakers in 
relation to this tendency. I have to show how this tend- 
ency affects Quakerism itself — the Quaker Schism. Be- 
fore doing so, I will glance at its relation to the Quaker 
Idea. 

The pursuit, then, of JZsthetics, the search for a Beauty 
above Nature and Art, through Art, Music, Poetry, does 
not deafen men to the message that " God has come to 
teach His people Himself;" that He has founded a Uni- 
versal Spiritual Kingdom for all men and women, and 
does Himself write the Laws of that Kingdom upon their 
hearts. But then this Idea cannot be claimed by Quakers. 
I have shown again and again that it was the Idea of the 
Catholic Church, that the Church was and is the only 
thorough expression and form of that Idea which George 



CHAP. III.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 197 

Fox perceived ; and that, therefore, his attempt to give 
that Idea an expression and form, his attempt to make 
Quakerism its expression, was futile and unnecessary, — 
because that which he attempted to make, already exist- 
ed; was schismatic, — because the attempt was a denial 
that it did exist. I shall show that the Idea did exist in 
the Catholic Church in relation to ^Esthetics, hundreds 
of years before Fox was born. I might quote many pas- 
sages from S. Clement of Alexandria, which would prove 
it at once. But we need not go so far back : we need not 
even go out of our own country. The earliest records of 
the Church of England supply an excellent instance : — 

" In hujus monasterio abbatissas [Hildae] fuit frater 
quidam divind gratia specialiter insignis, quia carmina- 
religioni et pietati apta facere solebat." "Ipse non ab 
hominibus, neque per hominem institutus, canendi artem 
didicit : sed Divinitus adjutus gratis canendi donum ac- 
cepit. Unde nihil unquam frivoli et supervacui poematis 
facere potuit." "Visumque est omnibus ccelestem ei a 
Domino concessam esse gratiam"* 

The Quaker principle is here exhibited, not as a princi- 
ple shutting out Art as worldly, not as a sign of the ab- 
sence of God ; but as vindicating Art as churchly, as a 
sign of the Presence of the Inspiring Word. Poets, 

* See the whole beautiful story of Caedinon, in Bede, Hist. 
Eccles., lib. iv. cap. xxiv. : Quod in Monasterio ejus fuerit Frater 
cui donum canendi sit Divinitus concessum. — pp. 112, 119. V. Bedce 
Opera Omnia, vol. iii.; J. A. Giles, LL.D. [8vo., Lond. 1843.] 

I owe the suggestion of the use of this story to an admira- 
ble series of Letters on the Study of English History, signed " H.," 
in the Educational Magazine for 1841. 



198 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

Painters, Musicians, in all ages — Heathens or Christians 
— have claimed an Entheus as the origin of their epics, 
pictures, or hymns. The Church was not the cause of 
this Entheus,, any more than she was the cause of the en- 
lightening of every man by the Divine Word. She was 
the witness and explainer of it. She told men from Whom 
it came. She declared "the unknown God." 

v. But it was the Church which declared it. That is, 
it was that very Body which Quakerism regarded as the 
extreme and ultimate term of Apostasy, as the body most 
blind to the Divine Light, the most empty of His Living 
Presence — it was this Body which asserted That Presence 
in spheres and tendencies out of which Quakerism excluded 
It. So, even if Quakerism permitted Quakers to exercise 
themselves in JEsthetics, it would become no cause of 
growth to Quakerism as such. For the principle is an- 
ticipated by the Catholic Church, as every true and neces- 
sary principle is (or it would not be Catholic), and its 
assertion by any Sect would be a work of supererogation. 

If sanctioned by that which the Church holds in some 
sense in common with the earliest Quakers, it is still more 
sanctioned by that which the Church holds in opposition 
to them. The Indwelling of the Divine Word seemed to 
half the Quaker converts to throw doubt, difficulty, or un- 
importance, upon His outdwelling. They could hardly 
bring themselves to believe that M the Word was made 
Flesh." So confused and contradictory were their 
glimpses of this truth — the truth of the Gospel, that a 
series of implicit denials of it might be drawn from their 



CHAP. III.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 199 

works.* Thus they often asserted that the Light was in 
them as He was in Christ 5 dividing the Eternal Word 
from the Lord Jesus. By an easy transition, the ex- 
treme Quakers pantheistically imagined themselves incar- 
nations of the Divine Word, as Christ Jesus was an 
incarnation, and so lost sight of The Incarnation — the 
hope of every man, the hope of the whole world. This 
imagination led Naylor and his disciples in their blas- 
phemous and fanatical procession through the streets of 
Bristol. 

The Incarnation gives sacredness to Art, because it is, 
as I have said before, the vindication of the external 
World as the work of God's hands, as the object of His 
care ; and the vindication of all human powers, faculties, 
pursuits, as the effects of His constitution of mankind. 

* In America, where Quakerism had freer play and room for 
development, these were the questions which the leading 
Quaker ministers were debating upon : Whether Christ hath 
anything in Heaven which he had not before the World was ? 
Whether Christ's Body, which the nails entered, did rise to 
Heaven? It rose, some answered; but when the cloud re- 
ceived Him out of their sight, Christ was separated from it. 
No part of the Virgin's substance, or Man's nature, is in 
Heaven. An old preacher said, he "could not make up his 
mind if That Which was crucified ivithout us was the Godhead, 
or the Virgin's substance." Many said, "This is a nicety ; 
and to be ignorant of it, or disbelieve it, does not hinder a man 
from being a true minister of Christ !" — George Keith : Some 
Reasons and Causes of the late Separation that hath come to pass at 
Phila.delphia, betwixt us called by some the Separate Meeting, and 
others that meet apart from us, p. 21. Circ. 1690. 



200 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

JEsthetic faculties, in all their forms of Picture, Sculp- 
ture, Music, Poem, Drama, are provided inherently in 
His constitution of mankind ; for they rise in men, as 
men, wherever men are, in all countries and all times : 
they are not the mere results of tradition, nor of inter- 
course between nation and nation. 

vi. But the question still remains, Is the ^Esthetic ten- 
dency consistent with the Quaker Schism ? I have said 
it is not, — on my own premises : it remains to show that 
Quakerism itself declares that it is not. I have quoted 
(in the chapters upon Discipline) its positive prohibition 
of Music. I wish to show here that the prohibition was 
inherent in the Quaker Schism. 

Solomon Eccles, one of the early Quaker missionaries, 
who at various times accompanied George Fox in his mis- 
sions was originally a musician. He passed, like the other 
leading Quakers, through all the stages of Puritanism — 
the Presbyterian, the Independent, the Anabaptist — into 
Quakerism. As long as he was "out of the Light" he 
never questioned the lawfulness of his profession. " But 
when truth came," says he, "I was not able to stand be- 
fore it; the Lord did thunder grievously against this 
practice ; and I would fain have pleaded the harmlessness 
of it, but no pleading would serve ; it was nothing but 
vanity, and vexed the good Spirit of God. Oh, it 
was hard to flesh and blood to give it up, for it was not 
only my livelihood, but my life was in it. Now the Wit- 
ness of God did often smite me for it before I could yield 
to the Lord to give it up : and while I, with the wrong 
thing, strove to prove it lawful, that pure thing that was 



CHAP. III.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 201 

sent of God took away my peace from me."* The result 
was, he carried all his books and instruments to Tower 
Hill, and burnt them amid the teasings of the mob. 

In the form of Picture and Sculpture the JEsthetic ten- 
dency of the Age is at war, though not with the letter 
perhaps, yet with the spirit of Quakerism. When Clark- 
son took the portrait of this Schism, at the beginning of 
the Century, he spoke of the Arts as implicitly prohibited. 
A few amateurs, he says, had prints in folios. But in all 

* A Musick Lector ; or, the Art ofMusiclc (that is so much vindicated 
in Christendome) , discoursed of by way of Dialogue between three men 
of Several Judgments. The one a Musician, and Master of that 
Art, and zealous for the Church of England, who calls Musick 
The Gift of God, The other a Baptist, who did affirm it to be a 
decent and a harmless practice. The other a Quaker (so called), 
being formerly of that Art, doth give his judgment and Sen- 
tence against it; "but yet approves of the Musick that 
pleaseth God" [t. e, Quakerism]. Written by Solomon Eccles. 
[4to., Loud. 1667, pp. 28.] Pp. 9, 10 : " While I was taught of 
men, I could follow it (viz.), when the Church of England was 
governed by Episcopal Order I could follow it, and call it The 
Gift of God, When I became a Presbyter I made a trade of it, 
and never questioned it at all : and after that I became an In- 
dependent, and I could follow it ; and when I came further and 
was baptized with water, and eat Bread and Wine with them, about 
the year 1642, they encouraged me in it, and some of them 
had their children taught on the Virginals. But I went fur- 
ther, and became an Antinomian (so called), and then I could 
teach men's sons and daughters on the Virginals and on the 
Viol ; and I got the two last years more than a hundred a 
year with my own hands, and lived very high, and perceived 
that the longer I followed it the greater income I had." 



202 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

his intercourse with the Quakers he only saw three pic- 
tures hanging framed upon the walls — one of Penn's 
Treaty with the Indians, one of a Slave Ship, and one 
of Ackworth School. Within the last five or six years, I 
remember to have seen an article against portraits of any 
kind, in that strict Quaker periodical, The Friend, of 
Philadelphia. The tendency of Quakerism is not only to 
be anti-^Esthetic, but to account a value and virtue to lie 
in being so.* 

vii. I think I have thrown some light upon the cause 
of decay which I mentioned in the commencement of this 
chapter, namely, that the tendency of Quakerism is es- 
sentially anti-JEsthetic, and the tendencies of the Age, 
Esthetic; that by this opposition the Age and Quak- 
erism are pledged to an incessant war — a war of the 
ghostly strength of the Seventeenth Century against the 
living strength of the Nineteenth ; and that in this war 
Quakerism must lose. 

* Solomon Eccles, Musick Lector, pp. 10, 11 : "I have heard 
divers men, and some of all religions, and almost all people, 
especially those of the Universities, highly commend Musick. 
But 0, the Truth, the Spirit of Truth, nor the children of 
Truth, can never bear it ; but Truth and her children do 
trample it under foot : 'tis Babylon's, and down it must and 
shall for ever. And since I, through the good hand of God, 
had an eye open in me to see where I stood, I soon sided with 
the Truth, and stood off from the reasoning part ( ! ), and then 
the Zeal of God rose up as hot as fire, and I greatly loathed 
myself to see what cursed ground I stood in, and I reckon it 
a happy day that I was redeemed out of a vain practice." 



CHAP. III.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 203 



CHAPTER IV. 

i. The Commercial Tendency of the Age — Quakers Servants 
rather than Masters of it — Decay of Enthusiasm involves 
entire decay. 
ii. Losses of Quakerism by the re-fulfilment of the Quaker 
Idea in the Catholic Church — Fulfilment prior to Quak- 
erism, 
iii. Fulfilment coeval with Quakerism, 
iv. Fulfilment in our Age, 

v. Fulfilment, by that School in the English Church now 
attempting a Reformation — Points of Touch with the 
old Quaker attempt — Puseyism and Popular Unrest — Ne- 
cessity of the Quaker Principle of Waiting. 
vi. Dr. Pusey on the Inward Presence of the Word of God — 

The Quaker Idea, 
vii. On the Principle of Church Unity — The Quaker Principle, 
viii. On the Principle of Conduct — The Quaker Principle. 
ix. On the Principle of Discipline — The Quaker Principle. 
x. The Quaker Idea fulfilled by the most Unquakerly Men, 
by the Church becoming anti-Quakerly. 

i. I might continue the comparison of Quaker tenden- 
cies with the tendencies of this Age, by speaking of its 
intensely Commercial character. But the relation of 
Quakers to Commerce is too much a matter of proverb 
and daily experience to need pointing out. It has been 



204 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V 

said by all the most thoughtful men of the Age that the 
Commercial tendency is our most dangerous symptom, 
because it so easily lapses in the basest of all sins — 
Money Worship ; because the possession of Money is 
made to excuse a man from the want of everything pure, 
lovely, noble, and righteous ; and because the pursuit of 
Money is certain death to every other enthusiasm. Money 
is a more cruel and frightful idol than the Saints, the Sur- 
plice, the Directory, or Dipping. But Quakerism in no- 
wise witnesses against the worship of it as it witnessed 
against the worship of the other four ; and if these were 
the idols of any Romanists, Churchmen, Presbyterians, or 
Baptists, to the same extent is Money the idol of modern 
Quakerism. It is said that Whitefield and Wesley com- 
plained that their converts, who went to no plays, balls, 
races, or other worldly amusements, yet became worldly 
by their love of Money. We have seen the same result 
in Quakerism. The unchurchly prohibition of exercises 
which are Human, and not carnal, explains both. Our 
Divine Discipliner has given us Arts, Music, Poetry, the 
Drama, as preservatives from worldliness, — if acknow- 
ledged and used as His gifts. But if we account these 
themselves worldly, we throw ourselves under the mercy 
of the World we think to escape : nothing is left for the 
exercise of our faculties, save eating, drinking, making 
money. The growth of Quakerism lay in its enthusiastic 
tendency. The submission of Quakers to the commercial 
tendency is a signing away of the life of their own Schism. 
Pure Enthusiasm and the pursuit of Money (which is an 
enthusiasm) can never co-exist, never co-operate. Where 



CHAP. IV.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 205 

one is a sign of strength, the other is a sign of weakness. 
One must always cast out the other before it can hope to 
carry on its own purposes. What would become of the 
Quaker bankers if they should be seized with the spirit 
of Fox and Howgill, and warn every man or woman who 
came to their desks to cash a cheque, to turn to the Light 
Within ? 

ii. But the greatest loss of power reserved for Quaker- 
ism is the reassumption by the Catholic Church of those 
Catholic truths which Quakerism was separated to witness 
to and vindicate. I have spoken so much of this in scat- 
tered places throughout the Essay, that I need add very 
little here. I shall just say, that the Church has a right 
to fulfill the Quaker Idea (the Truth which George Fox 
and his fellows beheld, as distinct from that individually 
and secularly characterized Schism which they built as a 
home for that Truth), because it was in the Church before 
George Fox beheld it, as their great Apologist implicitly 
confesses by his quotations and authorities. 

iii. But not only before Quakerism, but coevally with 
Quakerism also, the Quaker Idea, as distinct from its 
Schismatic dress, was in the Church. I need only men- 
tion the names of Henry More, John Smith, Edmund 
Elys, in England. Abroad, Ann Docwra asserted that 
the French Priest Malebranche, and Josiah Martin — that 
Archbishop Fenelon — were Quakers. Yet More, Male- 
branche, Fenelon, saw no necessity of Schism involved in 
their faith. 

iv. But I am concerned more with the fulfilment of the 
Quaker Idea by the Church in our Age, and as a cause 



206 THE PECTJLIUM. [BOOK V. 

of existing Quaker weakness, than with any historical 
examples of it. I should most strengthen this argument 
by quoting from books which the circumstances of this 
Essay preclude me from using. If George Fox could re- 
turn to the world in our Age, seeking believers in the 
Inward Light, men who read all the discord and confusion 
in themselves and in the whole earth by the shining in of 
the Eternal Word upon every man, and over every place 
and thing, he would find them amongst the writers and 
readers of certain books which the Sects and parties of the 
Religious World confederate together to misrepresent and 
abuse. 

v. Further, the great point in the History of the 
Church in England, at this time, will be described by 
future writers as her intense perception of the necessity 
of Reformation, her efforts and struggles to reform her- 
self by God's indwelling Grace. What George Fox and 
the Quakers were seeking in the Seventeenth Century, 
what the Quakers as a body are not caring the least 
about now, — that the English Church is seeking with all 
her strength and earnestness ; and that is, the Reforma- 
tion of the outward and visible Catholic Church. We 
have seen that the Apostles of Quakerism witnessed how 
such a Reformation must be carried on : — by a perception 
that the Indwelling Spirit of Christ was the only real 
Reformer ; by all individual Christians realizing more in- 
tensely the Presence of God in themselves, by asserting 
the unlimited extension of His Grace. 

How is that body of priests and laymen in the English 
Church who call themselves Reformers, who at least en- 



CHAP. IV.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 207 

deavor to be Reformers, who are known to newspaper 
writers, and the autocrats of platforms and coteries by the 
inames High Churchmen, Tractarians, Laudians, Puseyites 
K *—1iow is this school endeavoring to carry on the Refor- 
mation ? Platform heroes, the irresponsible autocrats of 
newspapers, dogmatical ladies and youths, will tell us, 

I By priestcraft, by bringing popery into their churches ; 
by lighted candles, altar-cloths, crosses ; by nunneries ; by 
music, vestments, continual services, and so on.' Surely, 
such men are at the very extreme of the Ecclesiastical 
path to the early Quakers : they seem to make Reforma- 
tion consist in the introduction and multiplication of the 
very things, the abrogation and destruction of which to 
the uttermost was the end of the Quaker Reformation — 
of that Puritan Reformation in which Quakerism was the 
last term. 

The Quakers were always telling their hearers that they 
could only understand the work which they were carrying 
on, by Waiting. The bustling, restless spirit was the 
spirit which the Reformation of God would never touch. 

II Come out of your bustlings, you that are bustling and 
in strife one against another," says George Fox, " whose 
spirits are not quieted, but go on fighting with words, 
whose hearts turn against each other with a mad blind 
zeal ; who are up in your wantonness, lightness, and plea- 
sures ; who set the whole course of nature on fire ; among 
whom the way of peace and that which is perfect is not 
known."* I think it is this same temper which hinders 

* Page 2 : An Epistle to all People on the Earth ; and the Igno- 
rance of the World, both Professors and Teachers, of the Birth that 



208 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

men from perceiving the Work of God in all Ages, which 
makes them confuse the signs and accompaniments of it 
with the work itself. Perhaps if we wait — if we ask the 
instruments of God in this work what they are hoping 
and longing to do and see done — we shall perceive more 
than by bustling with noise and unrest amongst the crew 
whose trade it is to deceive, and amongst the people who 
love to be deceived. And surely we can consult no one 
so fitly as that Christian doctor whose name the noisy 
multitude have thrust upon the movement. Puseyism 
surely must be the Ism of Pusey. Can we not learn it 
from him, as we have learnt Foxism from Pox ? Or 
must we still take mob coteries and newspapers for 
teachers ? 

vi. (1.) Dr. Pusey, in the Preface to his Sermons, 
says, there is one Great Repetition he does not wish to 
avoid — " the inculcation of the Great Mystery expressed 
in the words, to be 'In Christ,' to be 'Members of 
Christ/ ' Temples of the Holy Ghost,' that Christ 
doth through the Holy Ghost Whom He hath given 
unto us, dwell really and truly in the hearts of the faith- 
ful. This doctrine he has the more insisted upon, as it is 
to be feared that it is habitually neglected, even by many 
who do not in words deny it." * 

must be Silent, and of the Birth which is to speak; and of the differ- 
ence between Silence and Speaking, Also showing that it was the 
practice of many to wait in Silence upon God, to hear His Word and 
know His Voice. [London, 4to., 1657, p. 20.] 

* Sermons during the Season from Advent to Whitsuntide, p. 5, 
[2nd edition, 8vo., Oxford, 1848. 



CHAP. IV.] CAUSES OF QUAKER DECAY. 209 

vii. (2.) "The writer has long felt that a fuller appre- 
ciation of this doctrine might be the most hopeful means 
of reuniting earnest persons who now think themselves 
farther apart from each other than they really are. In 
different ways the impression was forced upon him, that 
pious men, who themselves are suspicious of their breth- 
ren and have brought heavy accusations against them, as 
though they 'corrupted the Gospel of Christ,' were 
really only anxious as to this, that nothing should be said 
or taught which should in any way interfere with ' look- 
ing unto Jesus, as the Author and Finisher of our faith,' 
our only Hope and Confidence, our Help and Refuge. 
And whereas they themselves often use unguarded lan- 
guage, both as to the Church and the Sacraments, at 
which others, in their turn, take offence, he felt persuaded 
that they only meant this, that nothing is to occupy the 
place of Christ in the soul." * 

viii. (3.) " The Grace of Christ must precede our 
good will, must create it : the Grace of Christ must 
sustain our good will : the Grace of Christ must perfect 
it. Yet it is in us, not without us, that He perfects our 
good will : He builds us up, not as dead stones, without 
our will, but as living stones, with a Life from Himself 
with our will." " The works, though wrought in us, are 
more the works of God than ours." f 

ix. (4.) " It may be said to all parents, Ye may safely, 
ye cannot too early or too earnestly, press upon your 
children that they are the temples of the Holy Ghost, 
and ' therefore reverence thou Him That dwelleth within.' 

* Sermons, #*c, p. 6. f Sermons, $*c, p. 15. 

15 



i 



210 THE PECULIUM. [BOOK V. 

' What you would not do if I were by, that do not when 
alone ; for you are in the Presence of God, and He is as 
much within you as your own soul.' ( I recollected,' said 
a little child who had been so taught, 'that I was the 
temple of the Holy Ghost, and left off, ashamed, what I 
was speaking.' " * " How, among us elders, would back- 
bitings, or unloving or vain or proud words, cease, if we 
recollected that our tongues are members of that body 
wherein Christ dwells." \ 

x. All the sermons of this eminent doctor, the supposed 
leader of the movement for Reformation in the English 
Church, breathe the same spirit. In the four extracts I 
have made, from the preface alone, Quakers may find the 
essence of their own founder's perceptions and wants ex- 
pressed. In the first, the Quaker principle of an Inward 
Divine Word in the individual soul. In the second, the 
Quaker principle of the Indwelling Spirit as the bond 
of Church unity. In the third, His moving of the will 
as the principle of Christian conduct. In the fourth, the 
principle of effectual Discipline and Education. And 
these perceptions of the first Quakers are found to be ful- 
filled in the Church, by one who is at the extremest dis- 
tance from the Quaker formalism of no forms, not by one 
who is nearing that formalism of no forms ; — are found 
to be fulfilled — not when she becomes unchurchly — not 
when she gives up, but when she sees most in, Sacra- 
ments, Rites, written Offices — not when she slackens her 
hold of, but when she grasps most firmly, her sacrificing 
Priesthood and her Apostolical Succession. 

* Sermons, frc, p. 26. f Ibid. p. 27. 



H 156 82 <l 





4°* 










>■ 



\^ffij? %j*^S*>* \/^fi\*r\ 



.1 









A°«* 




°o 






,»"•. 



«5°«* 





•s™r. oV •'mil" 1 

; *X1^ ^°^ '•'IP* (J 











'• ^ : W ^* 

q» A> Zi^zSsisS&C* Deaadified using the Bookkeeper process. 

O > . ^^BS) * Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 

-0 «7\ ** ^^^^fS * Treatment Date: April 2006 

b*%J*^'* o 5 %..**^V?'* - PreservationTechnologies 

**£V {OP A t«0 **> \^ A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

k *j£ .-^^ >*^^*» 2± A 111 Thomson Park Driv e 

• ^rk ^V 1 ♦ rf{\«» /Ok* 1 ^*ic*. A^* Cranberry Township, PA 16066 






"^^V -c (724)779-2111 




6°* . 



•* 4>* <U 

»'* \* .. * 


















<1* * 




,* *<t> A - * *A 
























^.jafcA 








*Bk MAY 82 

N. MANCHESTER, 
t&P INDIANA 46962 



O * 









. 




